Filmmaker Osgood Perkins is riding high on the success of Longlegs, which received critical acclaim AND audience acclaim; to date, it has racked up over $90 million against a sub-$10 million budget.
This is what I’ve been saying about budgets all summer. People WILL go see movies other than superheroes and sequels, but you have to keep those budgets low. If Longlegs cost, say $40-50 million, it would only just be breaking even, but with a tiny budget, it’s a smash hit. Similarly, It Ends With Us, which is budgeted around $25 million—the line where “low” budget turns into “mid-budget”—looks really good with its $80 million worldwide opening weekend. But if that budget goes up even a little, it starts looking less impressive. Anyway.
Longlegs is the summer horror hit, and now Osgood Perkins is coming on with his next film, an adaptation of Stephen King’s short story The Monkey. First published in 1980, a substantially revised version of The Monkey appears in Skeleton Crew, which was published in 1985. I VASTLY prefer King’s short fiction to his novels. In short form, he is tense, he is tight, he is NOT going on tangents about galactic turtles, and he loves short stories about haunted objects. The Monkey is one such story, centered on one of those creepy old-timey toys that are monkeys banging cymbals together. Old-timey toys are inherently haunted, change my mind.
The Monkey is written and directed by Perkins, produced by horror maestro James Wan, and it stars Theo James in a dual role, playing twin brothers Hal and Bill. (The White Lotus was extremely good for his career. Not sure anyone has leveraged being in The White Lotus better than Theo James, except for Jennifer Coolidge.) The film also stars Tatiana Maslany, Elijah Wood, and Schitt’s Creek star Sarah Levy. Tatiana Maslany is going to get most of the attention—she’s great, and she deserves good roles after Marvel left her high and dry following the angry nerds’ angry reception of She-Hulk—but I am so glad to see Sarah Levy. I love Twyla on Schitt’s Creek. You know her thing with ghosts! I’m just going to pretend The Monkey is a side adventure of Twyla’s.
The Monkey will be out in February. Usually, that’s not a great sign of confidence in a film’s quality, but February is a good month for horror movies, so this is a solid release plan from distributor Neon. Speaking of Neon, though, they also had the US distribution rights to Mother’s Instinct, starring Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain. They released a trailer back in January, and there were a handful of interviews done at the start of summer, but Mother’s Instinct was released into (limited) theaters with absolutely NO fanfare a couple weeks ago, before hitting VOD this week. The film is rated 55% on Rotten Tomatoes, indicating mixed but not completely terrible reviews. For comparison, It Ends With Us is currently sitting at 59%, so it’s not like Neon buried it due to horrific reviews. But they DID bury it. Why? And why does it feel like the wheels are falling off every Hollywood marketing department at once?
Attached - Theo James running errands in London last week.
