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Are you looking for a show to watch? This time of year can be tricky, as a number of on-going series are going on winter hiatus, meaning that viewers have to do a bit of searching for their entertainment. Thankfully, Stephen King has a sterling reputation as a font of great media recommendations, and while he has recently change up his social media platform usage, he continues to doll out suggestions of titles for his Constant Readers to check out.
But that’s not all! In this week’s edition of The King Beat, the author’s latest streaming recommendation comes paired with two other fun stories – one being a delightful MPA rating for the first of many upcoming Stephen King adaptations coming in 2025, and the other being the heads up about a special new home video release of The Shining that you can pre-order right now. There’s a lot of fun stuff to discuss, so let’s dig in!
Need A New Show To Stream? Stephen King Recommends Giving The Midwich Cuckoos On Amazon Prime Video A Shot
Stephen King made the decision a few weeks ago to abandon Twitter due to increased toxicity, but the good news is that he has not ceased his social media habits. Instead, he has simply started using new venues – including both Bluesky and Threads. This is great for fans in part because it means that he has continued his habit of sharing new book, film, and television recommendations, and his latest suggestion is the 2022 series The Midwich Cuckoos, which is now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video with an AMC+ add-on subscription.
The show, which stars Keeley Hawes and Max Beesley and originally aired on Sky Max in the United Kingdom, is a couple of years old now, but apparently nobody told Stephen King about it, so he only recently discovered it. The author took to his personal Threads account a couple days ago to post about it, writing,
THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS (Amazon): Surprised there hasn’t been more talk about this. It’s a brilliant re-imagining of John Wyndham’s classic sci-fi/horror novel.
If the title sounds familiar but you can’t immediately place why, you’re probably a fan of the Village Of The Damned movies, which are based on John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos. The story is set in a small town that experiences a bizarre phenomenon when everybody is mysteriously knocked unconscious. The populace wakes up a day later seemingly unaffected, but after a few months, it’s discovered that every woman of child-bearing age is pregnant. When the kids are born, they not only creep everybody out by having familiar features, but it’s also revealed that they have dangerous psychic abilities.
The 2022 adaptation of The Midwich Cuckoos was created by David Farr (whose prior writing credits include the 2011 Joe Wright film Hanna), and the series consists of seven hour-long episodes. If you already have a Prime Video subscription, you can get a free week-long AMC+ trial, and you may want to use it to take advantage of Stephen King’s recommendation.
The Monkey Rating Will Put A Smile On All Constant Readers Excited For A Gory Good Time
Next year is set to be absolutely massive for Stephen King adaptations. As I’ve previously noted in this column, 2025 is set to see as many as six brand new King-related film and television projects arrive for our viewing pleasure, and while not all of the projects currently have firmly set release dates, we do know which one is arriving first. Writer/director Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey is scheduled to arrive in theaters everywhere in February, and based on the Motion Picture Association rating that was just revealed, Constant Readers may feel inclined to wear a poncho or some other liquid-shielding garment when checking it out on the big screen.
FilmRatings.com (via JoBlo) now features an official listing for The Monkey, and the content warning for the upcoming Stephen King movie makes it sound delightfully gross and very adult oriented – despite previous comments from the writer/director suggesting that it’s a movie that “kids and their parents wanna go see together.” Per the MPA, the new film is overflowing with material only suited for mature audiences, and it has been labeled with a hard R rating. Per the website, it’s,
Rated R for strong bloody violent content, gore, language throughout and some sexual references.
The Monkey is based on the short story of the same name from Stephen King’s 1985 omnibus Skeleton Crew (first published within a booklet included with the November 1980 issue of Gallery magazine, and the adaptation was first announced in May 2023. Production on the movie began in secret around this time last year after the film quietly put together a stellar cast that includes Tatiana Maslany, Elijah Wood, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell, and Sarah Levy in the supporting ensemble.
Theo James, best known for his role in The White Lotus Season 2, and Netflix’s The Gentlemen, stars in the film as a pair of estranged twin brothers who are forced to reunite in adulthood when a supernatural toy from their childhood – a drum-banging monkey – resurfaces and initiates a plague of deadly mayhem. Whenever the little animal percussionist activates, people die, and the siblings have to find some way to destroy it.
The Monkey is Osgood Perkins’ follow-up to Longlegs, one of the best horror movies of 2024, but while that film was super effective in freaking audiences out, the filmmaker’s newest feature is looking to have a different kind of impact. The new genre title may feature a whole lot of blood and gore (as the rating confirms), but the trailer that was released back in October suggests that it may end up being the first Stephen King movie made with comedy at front of mind.
Neon, the distributor that helped turn Longlegs into one of the biggest hits of summer 2024, has picked up The Monkey for release (the company’s first Stephen King adaptation), and it will be arriving in theaters across the country on February 21, 2025 (one of the year’s earliest must-see big screen features). You can be sure that I’ll be writing about the film a lot more in the coming weeks, so stay tuned here on CinemaBlend for more previews, behind-the-scenes stories, and more.
A New Limited Edition Steelbook For The Shining Is Now Available For Pre-Order
If you’re an avid physical media collector like I am, you also may have a healthy appreciation for Steelbooks. They regularly feature cool, unique artwork, and they typically look a hell of a lot better on a shelf than the black/blue plastic cases of standard 4K UHDs and Blu-rays. The big drawback, of course, is that when a Steelbook goes out of print, they tend to become expensive collector’s items, so there is consistently a dose of FOMO that arrives with new releases.
With that in mind, allow me to give you the heads up that a brand new Steelbook edition of The Shining is on the way in early 2025, and it’s available for pre-order right now.
Multiple Steelbooks for The Shining have been made in the past, but while older editions now can go for about $400 on the secondary market, you can purchase another version right now and it will be shipped to you in February of next year. Walmart has put up a listing for an exclusive, special edition version of the beloved Stanley Kubrick horror film that not only includes 4K UHD and Blu-ray editions of the movie along with a digital code, but features some pretty rad artwork.
As you can see in the image above, the case is mostly a bold red (a shade reminiscent of the bathroom in The Gold Room of The Overlook Hotel where Jack Torrance has a conversation with Delbert Grady), and the front features an embedded fireman’s axe designed to look like the one that Jack wields in the film’s third act. The inside includes the terrified visage of Shelley Duvall’s Wendy Torrance, who is horrified to see that her husband is breaking down a door in the hopes of chopping her and her young son to bits.
The size of the Steelbook run is not specified on Walmart’s website, but once the exclusive is gone, it will be gone for good… so if you really want to add this special version of The Shining to your ultimate Stephen King collection, you should do yourself a favor in acting fast to order a copy.
That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of The King Beat, but I am not yet done for 2024! The year might be coming to an end very soon, but I will have a brand new edition of this column waiting for you here on CinemaBlend next Thursday, collecting all of the biggest headlines from the world of Stephen King. In the meantime, if you’re looking for more related reading, you can do a deep dive into the long history of King’s stories in film and television with my series Adapting Stephen King.