How Disney Influenced A Major Detail In Osgood Perkins’ Latest Horror Flick ‘The Monkey’

Just a few days out from the wide release of Neon’s horror-comedy, The Monkey, director Osgood Perkins has shared a fun fact regarding a visual change given to the titular harbinger of death, a wind-up toy monkey, adjusting its design from Stephen King’s original short story. Taken from a line in the trailer, “the monkey that likes killing” is portrayed as a creepy, grinning artifact equipped with a small drum and a set of sticks, banging the instrument each time before selecting someone to meet a grisly and outrageous death. This differs from the King story, which originally saw the toy clad with a pair of cymbals. Perkins revealed in a conversation with SFX Magazine that, before production, a producer on the film had come up to him, mentioning, “Oh, by the way, Disney owns the cymbals, because of [the toy monkey in] Toy Story.”  This altered the trajectory of the toy’s look, since a cymbal-clanging simian was featured as a minor antagonist in Toy Story 3. 

“So it [couldn’t] be cymbals,” Perkins continued. “What if it was a drum? It’s one of those things where a limitation becomes an opportunity. If you’re making movies and you’re not up for that adage then you’re in real trouble!” he went on to thank Disney for their copyright, adding how he “preferred” the change.

Osgood Perkins is hot off the release of his 2024 supernatural horror movie Longlegs, which starred Nicolas Cage and Maika Monroe. He’s set to release yet another horror movie this year, titled Keeper, which shares a star from The Monkey, Tatiana Maslany, last seen in Disney+’s MCU series She-Hulk. The Monkey releases in theaters February 21, 2025. Watch the trailer below.