Dwayne Johnson spent two decades as Hollywood’s most dependable franchise muscle. His partnership with Benny Safdie has become the place where he tries to disappear instead. After The Smashing Machine, the drama in which Safdie buried him in prosthetics to play MMA fighter Mark Kerr, the pair are reuniting on Lizard Music, a live-action/CGI hybrid that hides Johnson inside an eccentric old man and points a filmmaker known for the anxious, adult crime of Good Time and Uncut Gems toward family audiences.

As Deadline first reported, Amazon MGM Studios has now given the project a theatrical release slot. Safdie wrote the screenplay himself, adapting Daniel Pinkwater’s novel of the same name. The story follows a boy (Theo Clark Leber) left to his own devices who stumbles upon a secret late-night broadcast of lizards playing otherworldly music, and a hidden door to the extraordinary swings open. His search for answers leads him to The Chicken Man (Johnson), a whimsical old eccentric, and his beloved companion, a very elderly chicken named Claudia.

What begins as a hunt for a hidden society turns, in the official synopsis, into a voyage through invisible worlds and the bond between two lost souls who find each other at just the right time. Pinkwater published the book in 1976, and its deadpan surrealism is a long way from the sweat and adrenaline that have defined the Safdie name.

Johnson’s part is billed as another transformative role, with extensive makeup and prosthetics turning him into the septuagenarian Chicken Man. It extends the bet he made with The Smashing Machine, the A24 release that premiered in competition at Venice and won Safdie the Silver Lion for best director: that the most marketable body in the business can be most interesting when it is unrecognizable.

The ensemble around them is unusually deep, pairing comedians with prestige names. Alicia Silverstone, Tim Heidecker, Arya Parvathi, Regina Hall, Colman Domingo, Jeff Goldblum, Rachel McAdams, Andrew Dice Clay and David Krumholtz also star. Producers are Scott Stuber and Nick Nesbitt of UA, Safdie through Out for the Count Productions, Johnson through Seven Bucks Productions, and David Koplan of Magnetic Fields Entertainment.

Lizard Music opens in theaters on December 25, 2027, a launchpad Deadline frames as ideal for reaching family audiences given the film’s fantasy-and-wonder tone. It arrives eight days after the December 17 openings of Disney and Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Secret Wars, New Line’s The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum and Lionsgate’s sequel The Housemaid’s Secret, while a Warner Bros. film directed by Nancy Meyers is also set for Christmas Day.

So is Alone at Dawn, Ron Howard’s actioner with Adam Driver and Anne Hathaway, which also comes from Amazon MGM. The studio is sending two of its own films out on the same holiday, and one of them co-stars a chicken who is 85 years old.

Tags: Dwayne Johnson, Benny Safdie, Amazon MGM Studios, Lizard Music, Daniel Pinkwater, release-date