The first new Stephen King movie of 2025 is almost here. In just a little over a week, Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey will be arriving in theaters, and that means you have the perfect amount of time to start preparing yourself for a wildly gory and outrageously entertaining time. It’s a fantastic adaptation of its short story source material, but it’s also very much a love letter to the legendary author, and that’s very much reflected in Perkins’ recent revelation about the film’s original title.
I had the chance to interview Osgood Perkins late last week, and it was while discussing his personal relationship with Stephen King’s work and the various references in the movie that he told me about both The Monkey’s original title and the major way that the setting changed over the course of development. That story leads this week’s edition of The King Beat – but I also have an update for all you Constant Readers about the film adaptation of The Long Walk, so without further ado, let’s dig in!
Osgood Perkins Reveals The Original Title And Setting For The Monkey And Discusses His Personal Relationship With Stephen King’s Work
The Monkey is unlike any Stephen King adaptation we’ve ever seen before, both in terms of volume of gore and its extreme humor, but it’s very much rooted in a deep appreciation for the author’s work. While I won’t spoil anything for you pre-release, I will note that there are nods and references all over the place, and its existence as a tribute formerly extended to its title as well, as Osgood Perkins long wanted to have the official title be Stephen King’s The Monkey.
The filmmaker told me that his goal with the adaptation was to capture a certain all-encompassing vibe of Stephen King’s work, and that original title was intended as a way of setting up the experience. He further tried to represent the energy of the horror auteur in early drafts by making it a period film, but that was an idea that he ultimately decided to put aside. Said Perkins,
I wanted to gesture to Mr. King as much as I could. I mean, when I wrote the script, every time I turned a draft in, it was called Stephen King's The Monkey. And ultimately, it's not called that for, you know, a thousand reasons, but for me it was always that. I wanted to make a movie that felt like a Stephen King movie that you would recognize it as such, even if you didn't know kind of what it was. I will say that the first drafts were written as '80s and '50s, that was the time period. Then I kind of felt like, 'Oh, that's been done.'
Setting the movie in the 1950s (a.k.a. the decade of “The Body”/Stand By Me) and the 1980s (a.k.a. the era of many early Stephen King classics) could have been fish in a barrel move in Osgood Perkins’ mission to honor the author. Hell, the 1950s and 1980s are also notably the key time periods in IT. As The Monkey developed, however, the writer/director felt that approach had already been done – he specifically name-dropped Stranger Things – and decided to go 1990s/2020s with the story.
Perkins told me that he hasn’t read all of Stephen King’s work (he specifically cited regret over having not read IT yet), but his history with the author’s stories goes back to his childhood and seeing his father – legendary actor Anthony Perkins – with copies of King’s books. He recalls being particularly entranced by one tome, telling me,
As a kid, I think I was more affected by it. My dad was a big paperback novel reader, and so I was always kind of sitting there as a kid kind of holding the Pet Sematary paperback and being like, 'This seems really big and fat,' and this cat has this insane look and the misspelled title with the kid's handwriting. All these elements seemed really sort of deep to me. I don't even really know why, but like the image and the feeling, the texture of what he was doing seemed to really come off of the cover even, strangely enough.
Continuing, Osgood Perkins explained that Stephen King’s writing also opened his eyes to the versatility of horror as a genre. He has a deep affection for Creepshow (which is notably the film that most closely matches The Monkey in terms of tone), and he also recalls a special revelation he had when he read Misery for the first time:
Creepshow was big for me as a kid. I loved comics. Bernie Wrightson's drawings are so brilliant, and the punchiness of that, the humor of that, the kind of willingness to entertain with horror really came across. Misery was the same thing. It was a book that I read, one of the first books I read, which felt like, 'Oh, this is meant to entertain with horror, not make you feel bad, but really kind of make you have a good time.'
Being entertained by horror and having a good time is very much what The Monkey is all about, and you’ll soon be able to experience it for yourself. The film, starring Theo James, Christian Convery, Tatiana Maslany, Elijah Wood, Colin O'Brien, Rohan Campbell, and Sarah Levy, arrives in theaters next Friday, February 21, and you should be sure to stay tuned here on CinemaBlend for more interviews with Osgood Perkins and the cast.
Director Francis Lawrence Provides Stephen King Fans With An Update On The Status Of The Long Walk
As I’ve noted a lot in previous columns, Stephen King fans are being spoiled in 2025. The Monkey is the first of five adaptations set to be released this year – the others being the films The Life Of Chuck and The Running Man and the two TV shows HBO’s IT: Welcome To Derry and MGM+’s The Institute. That being said, it feels ok to be greedy for more, knowing that Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk has completed production, and the director recently provided an update on the status of the movie.
Produced and set to be distributed by Lionsgate, the King feature started and completed principal photography in the second half of 2024, and Lawrence has revealed to Collider that the film isn’t totally done, but it’s nearing that point. He told the site that he will soon be traveling to London to oversee the scoring sessions, but he also added that “the cut is for the most part locked.”
Based on the book of the same name that Stephen King originally published under his pen name Richard Bachman, The Long Walk is a dystopian novel that centers on a competition that is essentially a death march. Teenage contestants have to walk and maintain a constant pace for as long as they possibly can; slowing down or stopping incurs warnings, and if anyone receives three warnings within an hour, soldiers monitoring the contest execute them. The last kid surviving wins a dream prize.
JT Mollner wrote the screenplay for the upcoming film, and he described the movie last summer as being as “hardcore” and “disturbing” as the source material. Stephen King loved his script, and he maintains shock that the project made it into production. It’s a story that many filmmakers, including George A. Romero and Frank Darabont, tried and failed to adapt, but Francis Lawrence has gotten further than anyone.
The filmmaker spoke to both The Long Walk’s history and his own personal history with the book and the adaptation in the recent interview, saying,
It's one of — if not my favorite — Stephen King novels. It was something that actually crossed my desk years ago, not long after I finished Constantine. It was when I was doing I Am Legend, and I wanted to do it, but Frank Darabont actually scooped up the rights. People have tried to make it over the years, and never could. We just kind of cracked it; I worked with JT Mollner, who did Strange Darling. He wrote a great draft, and it came together really quickly. I had this window, and we hit the right season to shoot it, and we put together an amazing cast. The cast is so good and the performances are great. I'm super happy with it.
The Long Walk does indeed feature a collection of fantastic actors, including Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Charlie Plummer, Judy Greer, and Mark Hamill. Hopefully we’ll get news soon about a release date for the film soon (perhaps at CinemaCon in late March/early April?), and if it’s not set for release in this calendar year, fingers are crossed it arrives in early 2026.
That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of The King Beat, but as always, I’ll be back next Thursday with a new column (and it will be a special one given the forthcoming arrival of The Monkey). In the meantime, you can educate yourself about all of the various film and television adaptations of the beloved authors work via my series Adapting Stephen King.
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