Lizard Music

On the morning of October 20, 2026, the first set photos from Lizard Music hit the wires and did a very specific thing: they made Dwayne Johnson disappear. Under heavy prosthetics and gray wisps of hair, the most recognizable face on the planet had become a seventy-something man walking a chicken through Brooklyn. Entertainment desks from Variety to Page Six ran the same word in their headlines. Unrecognizable.

That image is the clearest signal yet of what Benny Safdie is building. The film adapts Daniel M. Pinkwater's 1976 novel, a cult favorite about a boy named Victor who catches a late-night television broadcast of lizards playing music that seems to come from somewhere other than Earth. Safdie co-wrote the screenplay with Pinkwater himself, an unusual arrangement for a children's-book adaptation and a strong hint that the source's oddball DNA survived the trip to the screen.

Johnson stars and produces through Seven Bucks, sharing producer credits with Safdie, David Koplan, Scott Stuber, and Nick Nesbitt. Theo Leber, a newcomer, plays Victor. Regina Hall, Alicia Silverstone, Tim Heidecker, and Arya Parvathi fill out the live-action cast, while Colman Domingo, Jeff Goldblum, Rachel McAdams, and David Krumholtz lend voices to the film's fantastical side. Amazon MGM Studios has set a Christmas Day 2027 release, betting that a strange little story about lizards and an old man with a chicken can hold its own in the busiest corridor of the movie calendar. [edit]

Victor is a boy with time on his hands. The novel and the film's logline both start from that simple fact: he is left largely to his own devices, and the hours after dark stretch out in front of him. One night, flipping through television channels, he lands on something that should not exist. A broadcast, clearly unauthorized, in which a band of lizards performs music. Not cartoon lizards. Not puppets. The broadcast has the texture of a signal that wandered in from somewhere it was never supposed to reach.

Nobody else seems to know about it. Victor checks. He asks around, he tunes in again, and the broadcast refuses to explain itself. The music stays in his head. The question of where it comes from becomes the kind of obsession that only a kid with too much unsupervised time can sustain.

His search brings him, by degrees, to the Chicken Man. Dwayne Johnson plays him as a man in his seventies, and the neighborhood has presumably filed him under harmless local weirdo. He keeps an elderly pet chicken named Claudia, and the two of them cut an unlikely figure on the street. The Chicken Man is the one adult who does not laugh at Victor or change the subject. He has heard the broadcast. Or he knows what it means. Either way, he takes the boy seriously, and that changes everything.

What follows is a quest with three travelers: a curious kid, an old man, and a chicken. The questions they chase are deceptively simple. Are the lizards from outer space? From some other kind of space entirely? What is the music, and why is it being transmitted in secret, on a channel that ordinary viewers scroll past without noticing? The film's genre mix, adventure and family and fantasy and music, suggests the answers arrive through wonder rather than gunfire. Safdie has made a career out of characters who talk too fast and make terrible decisions under pressure. Here the pressure is different. It is the pressure of a mystery that might not want to be solved.

The supporting cast, including Regina Hall, Alicia Silverstone, Tim Heidecker, and Arya Parvathi, has been kept under wraps, with character names still unannounced as of the October 2026 production reports. The voice cast tells its own story. Colman Domingo, Jeff Goldblum, Rachel McAdams, and David Krumholtz are all credited as voices, which strongly implies that the lizard musicians and whatever else lives on the other end of that broadcast are performed in a recording booth rather than on set. That is a lot of vocal firepower pointed at the nonhuman half of the movie.

Production has been rolling through New York City, with Johnson spotted in Brooklyn and on the streets of Manhattan in full Chicken Man makeup. The choice of location matters. Pinkwater's novel has a distinctly American, slightly scruffy urban feel, the kind of city where a secret television signal could plausibly hide between the regular ones. Safdie knows this terrain better than most directors working today. His earlier films turned New York streets into pressure cookers. Lizard Music asks him to do something harder: make the same streets feel like a place where something wonderful might be waiting if you stay up late enough.

The film arrives December 25, 2027. Until then, the mystery of the lizards stays where the broadcast left it, unresolved and humming.[edit]