Every era of Hollywood has a star who seems too big to change. Dwayne Johnson has been that star for a decade: the biggest name, the biggest arms, the biggest opening weekends. So the photographs from the Coney Island set of Lizard Music on October 20, 2026 — Johnson aged, grey, stooped, unrecognisable as a character called The Chicken Man — are more than a fun bit of movie news. They are the latest chapter in one of the most deliberate career reinventions in modern film, and to understand them, it helps to understand where the story begins: not on a soundstage, but in children’s literature.
Lizard Music started life as a children’s novel by Daniel Pinkwater, an author treasured for stories that treat young readers as gloriously odd people rather than small consumers. The tale, as described in an October 19 Deadline report, concerns a boy who discovers a secret late-night broadcast — lizards, playing music from another world. Turning that premise into a feature film was never going to be a standard studio play, and the film adaptation has leaned into its strangeness at every step, starting with its director and its star.
The Safdie Effect
Director Benny Safdie built his reputation on films that feel lived-in and slightly unhinged, and his partnership with Johnson began with The Smashing Machine, a biographical film about Mark Kerr, a pioneer of mixed martial arts whose career rose and fell in the sport’s brutal early years. For Johnson, a former wrestler, the role was personal territory handled at an unaccustomed register: quieter, sadder, more exposed. Critics noticed. That film functioned as a proof of concept — for the industry, that Johnson could carry serious drama; for Johnson himself, that the experiment was worth repeating.
(Eva Rinaldi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0))Lizard Music is the repeat. It is also, notably, a very different kind of follow-up: where The Smashing Machine stayed close to Johnson’s athletic past, this film asks for a complete character transformation, into an elderly man in a bucket hat with age spots, grey stubble and a pizza slice in hand. The supporting cast — Alicia Silverstone, Rachel McAdams and Colman Domingo alongside young Theo Clark Leber — reads like the ensemble of a prestige drama, not a blockbuster. That is the point. An indie filmmaker at the helm, a beloved oddball novel as the source, and the world’s biggest star buried under prosthetics: every element signals a production chasing a feeling rather than a franchise.
Why This Story, Why Now
The timing matters. Johnson’s career has reached the stage where his commercial position is unassailable — the live-action Moana alone guarantees another global hit — which frees him to spend his capital on curiosity. The secret broadcast at the heart of Pinkwater’s story is a perfect metaphor for the film itself: something wonderful hidden in the static, available only to those awake enough to find it. As a coming-of-age story with one foot in the real world and one in the impossible, it sits in a tradition of fantasy film that treats childhood as a serious, strange country rather than a market segment.
(Eva Rinaldi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0))There is risk in it, of course. Audiences who buy a ticket for The Rock may not know what to do with The Chicken Man, and gentle fantasy is a harder sell than explosions. But the history of movie stardom is full of performers who extended their relevance by decades precisely by refusing to repeat themselves, and full of others who faded by protecting the formula too carefully. Johnson, filming in New York City rather than on a franchise backlot, appears to have chosen his side.
(Eva Rinaldi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0))What happens next is the usual, tantalising wait: more of the production will surface through filming in Brooklyn, a trailer will eventually test how the transformation plays in motion, and the release will answer the real question — whether audiences embrace Johnson the character actor as warmly as they embraced Johnson the phenomenon. The source novel has waited decades for its screen moment. If the first photographs are any indication, it may have found the unlikeliest possible champion: an old man with grey hair, kind eyes and a slice of pizza, standing exactly where a movie star used to be.
The Longer View
Step back, and the Safdie partnership looks like the hinge of Johnson’s whole career. The first act was construction: a wrestler building a body, a catchphrase and a brand until all three were known on every continent. The second act was conquest: a decade of franchise dominance in which his name above a title functioned as a financial guarantee. This third act, the one beginning with a broken-down fighter and continuing with an elderly man and his pizza, is about authorship — choosing directors with visions, source material with odd corners, and roles that cannot be played by simply being Dwayne Johnson at higher volume. It is a harder act to sustain, because it depends on taste rather than momentum, but the early evidence suggests his taste is interesting.
It also speaks to something in Pinkwater’s novel that a lesser production might have missed. The book’s secret broadcast is a reward for the awake and the curious: the world is full of wonders that only reveal themselves after the scheduled programming ends. Johnson, at this stage of his career, is making a version of the same discovery in public. The scheduled programming of superstardom said he should repeat himself forever. Instead he went looking for the other signal — and found, of all things, lizards, playing music, in the middle of the night.
For now, the Chicken Man remains mostly a silhouette against the Coney Island skyline: a hat, a coat, a slice of pizza, and a thousand questions. That is a healthy place for a film like this to begin — not with a marketing blitz, but with genuine curiosity about what the world’s most predictable star might do next, now that predictability is the one thing he seems determined to leave behind.