Dwayne Johnson & Benny Safdie Eye Reunion On Lizard Music

The Rock. Is. Cooking! 2025 has been a transformational year for Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson in more ways than one, with the wrestler-turned-movie-star-turned-budding-thespian closing deals to star in a Hawaiian crime movie from Martin Scorsese and buzzy fresh Darren Aronofsky psychological thriller Breakthrough, and putting in a performance in Benny Safdie’s upcoming A24 MMA biopic The Smashing Machine that helped earn the movie a 15-and-a-half minute standing ovation at this year’s Venice Film Festival. Now, the star once hailed the most electrifying man in sports entertainment is charging up to go again with Benny Safdie on Lizard Music, an adaptation of Daniel Pinkwater’s eponymous novel.

Per Deadline‘s reporting, this fresh project — which, it must be noted, has yet to land with a studio just yet — will see Safdie direct Johnson once again, this time in a transformative role of an altogether different kind to MMA hardman Mark Kerr: namely, the Chicken Man from Pinkwater’s fantastical 1976 children’s novel. For those unfamiliar with Pinkwater’s zany book, it follows an inquisitive newborn boy who, having stumbled upon a late-night broadcast of some lizards playing their unearthly music, finds himself on a horizon-expanding adventure that takes in hidden worlds, extraterrestrial activity, and a series of revelatory encounters with the Chicken Man — an oddball 70-something-year-old who keeps a chicken under his hat, and whose eccentric manner of whimsy and wisdom wouldn’t be out of place in Alice In Wonderland. Suffice it to say, this would almost definitely make Safdie and his muse a dead cert to go two for two in the “Dwayne Johnson as you’ve NEVER seen him before” headline stakes.

With Safdie having picked up the Silver Lion at Venice for his direction on The Smashing Machine, and Johnson — who does admittedly still have the miniature business of Fast X: Part 2, a live-action Moana, and a long-gestating Big Trouble In Little China requel to contend with — seemingly ready to shed his blockbuster movie star skin in favour of digging a little deeper just now, Lizard Music could be one of those projects for the duo that’s so utterly absurd that it could wind up being a masterstroke. And, lest we forget, Johnson has form playing a man who loves chicken — just ask Moana‘s Hei-Hei! But before we get to that, first up is the aforementioned The Smashing Machine, which is due to pummel its way into UK cinemas on 3 October.