At this point in his career, you would think that every Stephen King story that could be adapted to film has been — aside from the half-dozen he cranked out since the start of this sentence. Most filmgoers would cite something like It or The Shining here, but King’s also responsible for classic dramas like The Shawshank Redemption or Stand By Me.
As King’s career progressed, there were only a handful of stories in his bibliography that got a reputation as being genuinely unfilmable. For decades, The Long Walk had landed in that category, alongside other pieces like the auto-cannibalism story “Survivor Type” and King’s controversial early novel Rage. Unlike those, however, The Long Walk simply seemed cursed. Over the course of almost 40 years, the rights to The Long Walk passed through the hands of filmmakers like George Romero (Dawn of the Dead), Frank Darabont (The Mist, the 1988 remake of The Blob), James Vanderbilt (Zodiac, Scream VI, Scream 7), and André Øvredal (Trollhunter), none of whom ever got to the point of even starting the project.
With that level of development hell, it’s a shock that a movie was ever made at all, and a second, greater shock that the result was actually good. The Long Walk, directed by Francis Lawrence (Constantine), finally came out last year. Now it’s made it to streaming via HBO Max, where it hit #1 on the service’s charts after just one day.
The Long Walk is set in an alternate United States, which has been taken over by a military dictatorship following a civil war. As a sort of modernized bloodsport, 50 teenage boys (one from every state) volunteer for the annual Long Walk, in which they travel on foot across the desolate American Midwest. Any of them who slow or stop, for whatever reason, are shot dead; the last survivor is awarded a pile of money and their fondest wish.
King originally wrote The Long Walk in around 1966, when he was a freshman at the University of Maine. It wasn’t published until 1985, as part of a short-lived experiment by King to put out several novels under the pen name of Richard Bachman. Four of those novels, including The Long Walk, were later collected in an anthology called The Bachman Books.
What’s proven odd about King’s Bachman era is its bizarre prescience. For example, Bachman’s The Running Man, which served as the basis for the 1988 Schwarzenegger film, is an effective satire of the reality TV era despite being written 15–20 years beforehand. You don’t often think of King as a writer of parody, but somehow, Bachman was.
In The Long Walk‘s case, it works as a sort of lost ancestor of the young-adult dystopia. Modern viewers often draw a straight line between The Long Walk and Battle Royale or The Hunger Games, which are different implementations of the same core concept: children being forced to kill and die as part of something they can’t or won’t understand.
If King intended The Long Walk to work as any kind of deliberate metaphor, he’s never been explicit about it. A few generations of critics have discussed The Long Walk as a parallel for the Vietnam War, which makes a lot of sense coming from one of the best-known writers of the boomer generation.
The Long Walk, in-story, makes little sense, but kids sign up for it anyway out of hopes of finding some way out of the trap of their circumstances. Instead, most of them end up dead. It’s a war by another name, waged on the young by the old. It’s not a surprise that the story continues to resonate to this day. You can compare the basic concept to any number of modern American problems, from climate change to military misadventure to capitalism itself. The Long Walk works as an extended metaphor for any or all of them.
It doesn’t hurt that Lawrence’s film runs at a surprisingly fast pace. Any time it starts to slow down, something else happens to retake your attention. Every time Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) and McVries (David Jonsson) start having fun, another walker dies for some incredibly stupid reason, like wearing the wrong shoes for the Walk. It would’ve been easy for a filmmaker to turn The Long Walk into a simple series of conversations, but it’s careful and deliberate. We like (most of) these characters, but sooner or later, almost all of them have to die. That makes it hard to look away.
Like The Mist before it, Lawrence has also changed some of the finer details of King’s original novel. If you’ve read The Long Walk, then without spoilers, the movie plays out differently. Some changes are necessary, while others have proven controversial, but the movie features a new take on King’s original vision. Even if you’re a die-hard fan of the original book, it’s worth watching 2025’s The Long Walk for yourself.
The Long Walk is streaming now on HBO Max.