‘The Monkey’, Osgood Perkins’ Next Pic, Racks Up 109M Views In Trailer Traffic, A Record For Independent Horror Film

EXCLUSIVE: The first trailer for Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey is quite the success, with a current running viewership across all platforms including TikTok of 109 million. The Neon movie opens February 21.

The movie, the first for Perkins after the success of Longlegs and based on the Stephen King short story, racked up more than 43M views in its first 24 hours of dropping online and clicked past 100M in its first 72 hours, arguably a record for a non-MPA studio independent horror movie. The figures come from WaveMetrix.

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We reported back in September that among those horror films sans TikTok views, 28 Years Later was the second most watched at 60.2M behind It Chapter Two (96M views, $91M opening). 28 Years Later racked up well north of 146M global views.

Among other horror trailers that count TikTok views, The Monkey beats such pics as Smile which netted 100M views ($22.6M opening); The Black Phone at 73M for its first trailer and 37M for its second trailer ($23.6M opening); and Talk To Me’s second trailer which came in at 23M. The Monkey also beat out both first and second trailers for Nosferatu at 74M and 48M, respectively ($21.6M 3-day opening).

The Monkey follows twin brothers who find a mysterious wind-up monkey. Thereafter a series of outrageous deaths tear their family apart. Twenty-five years later, the monkey begins a new killing spree forcing the estranged brothers to confront the cursed toy. Theo James stars with Tatiana Maslany, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell and Sarah Levy, with Adam Scott and Elijah Wood.

Pic is produced by James Wan (The Conjuring, Saw) and Michael Clear for Atomic Monster; Dave Caplan (Babylon) for C2 Motion Picture Group; Brian Kavanaugh-Jones (Insidious) for Range; and Chris Ferguson (Longlegs, Child’s Play) for Odd Fellows. C2 financed the film.

A week ago, Neon screened the film to the public for the first time at a secret screening for Beyond Fest at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood.

Perkins’ Longlegs was a surprise hit for Neon, opening to a record $22.4M for the distributor off a P&A of less than $10M and becoming its highest-grossing film at the domestic box office with $74.3M.

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