Numbers be damned, Amazon snaps up The Rock and Benny Safdie's very weird next movie
There are more important questions than "How much money did The Smashing Machine lose," like "How weird is Lizard Music going to be?"
"There they are: The suckers that are going to pay us to adapt one of the weirdest children's books ever written." Photo: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
There’s a narrative hanging over Benny Safdie and Dwayne Johnson’s recent biopic The Smashing Machine right now, and it’s mostly made up of numbers. The Smashing Machine didn’t make very much money, see, which is something that feels like it would have been pretty obvious from the jump: Whatever box office draw The Rock maintains in his blockbuster life probably wasn’t going to translate to an A24 indie biopic about drug addiction, and Safdie’s biggest hit with his brother, 2019’s Uncut Gems, only barely cracked The Smashing Machine‘s reported $50 million budget. But that box office fixation has also obscured several questions that are a lot more interesting than “Did it make back the budget?”—including “Is the movie itself any good?” (Eh.) “Will The Rock get an Oscar nomination out of it?” (Possibly!) And, perhaps most importantly: “Who’s now going to pony up for the insanely weird project that Safdie and Johnson have been talking very loudly about how they’re committed to making together next?”
That last one we can now answer definitively, because Amazon MGM is apparently still hot to get into the Lizard Music business. Delighting the sort of very weird former children who used to trawl their school library shelves, seeking out the books with the strangest titles and covers to read, Safdie and Johnson have been talking about adapting the Daniel Pinkwater book for a while at this point, and now they’ve got formal studio backing. Pinkwater, for the unfamiliar, is an oldschool oddball of the highest sort, with a bibliography featuring titles like The Snarkout Boys And The Avocado Of Death, The Hoboken Chicken Emergency, and Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars—blends of sci-fi and comedy precision-designed to appeal to lil’ weirdos with a love of old movies, secondhand bookshops, and alternate realities. Many of them feature an eccentric older gentleman known as the Chicken Man (because of the chicken he carries on his head), which Johnson has, with the same boundless enthusiasm with which he usually tries to beat up buildings, or seize control of floundering superhero universes, decided will be his next big role.
