Amazon MGM Studios has set December 25, 2027 as the theatrical release date for Lizard Music, the live-action/CGI hybrid starring Dwayne Johnson and directed by Benny Safdie. The placement drops the Pinkwater adaptation into the most contested, and most valuable, window on the calendar: Christmas Day.
Johnson plays The Chicken Man, an eccentric septuagenarian who becomes a kindred spirit to a boy (Theo Clark Leber) who stumbles on a secret late-night broadcast of lizards playing otherworldly music. The role is billed as another transformation for Johnson, built on extensive makeup and prosthetics. Alicia Silverstone, Tim Heidecker, Arya Parvathi, Regina Hall, Colman Domingo, Jeff Goldblum, Rachel McAdams, Andrew Dice Clay and David Krumholtz also star.
Safdie adapted the screenplay from Daniel Pinkwater’s novel. Producers include UA’s Scott Stuber and Nick Nesbitt, Safdie for Out for the Count Productions, Johnson for Seven Bucks Productions, and David Koplan for Magnetic Fields Entertainment.
A Christmas corridor that is already stacked
The date is not an open lane. Disney/Marvel’s Avengers: Secret Wars opens December 17, 2027, as do New Line’s Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum and Lionsgate’s The Housemaid’s Secret. Those event titles get a full week of premium-format play before Lizard Music lands.
More pointed for Amazon MGM: the studio already has Ron Howard’s Alone at Dawn, starring Adam Driver and Anne Hathaway, on Christmas Day 2027, alongside a Nancy Meyers-directed Warner Bros film. That means Amazon will run two wide releases of its own against each other on the year’s biggest moviegoing day.
What the strategy signals
Christmas is the natural home for family fantasy: audiences are off work, children are out of school, and multigenerational groups turn up in numbers they don’t the rest of the year. Lizard Music‘s pitch — a boy, a hidden door, an old man and an 85-year-old chicken named Claudia — is engineered for exactly that audience.
The “transformative role” billing also matters. A heavily prosthetic Johnson, positioned as a whimsical father figure rather than an action lead, signals a different kind of four-quadrant play. It gives Amazon a clear counterprogramming card against the franchise action arriving a week earlier.
The risk is execution. Premium screens will be contested by Secret Wars and The Hunt for Gollum, and Amazon must decide how to split marketing and screen allocation between two very different Christmas Day titles. Studios rarely date two of their own wide releases on the same day without a plan: either one is expected to move, or the pair is meant to segment audiences and capture a larger combined share of holiday footfall.
What to watch from here
The date is two years out, and calendars shift as production and marketing budgets firm up. The useful signal for planners is the counterprogramming logic: while rivals stack franchise sequels on December 17, Amazon is staking the Christmas family slot early. Whether both Amazon titles hold the date, or one moves, is the next question for the 2027 calendar.
- December 17, 2027: Avengers: Secret Wars, The Hunt for Gollum, The Housemaid’s Secret
- December 25, 2027: Lizard Music, Alone at Dawn, untitled Nancy Meyers/WB film
- Amazon MGM now has two of its own wide releases on the same Christmas Day
Source: Deadline
