Info in Movie News | 2025 is shaping up to be a dream year for Stephen King fans. After the successful releases of Oz Perkins’ The Monkey and Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck, the spotlight now shifts to The Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence, who is set to bring The Long Walk, a chilling dystopian novel written by King in 1967 under the pen name Richard Bachman, to theaters. While Carrie became King’s first published novel in 1974, The Long Walk was actually completed years earlier, originally conceived as a grim allegory for the Vietnam War.
According to Collider, The Long Walk tells the story of a group of teenage boys competing in an annual death march through a dystopian United States ruled by a totalitarian regime. Contestants must maintain a walking pace of at least three miles per hour without stopping. Fall below the pace, or come to a halt, and they’re shot on the spot. There is no fixed finish line, the march is over only if there is one contestant alive. According to Lawrence, the high-stakes event is the main subject of the tale, however, it is the personal relationships of the characters that make the narrative to be the story’s heart. “The intimacy of the story against this larger-than-life contest is what I loved most. We’re with the boys every step of the way, feeling their exhaustion, fear, and fleeting hope,” he said.
The cast features a lineup of rising talent, including David Jonsson (Alien: Romulus), Cooper Hoffman (Licorice Pizza), Ben Wang (Karate Kid: Legends), Garrett Wareing (Manifest), Joshua Odjick (Wildhood), and more. Mark Hamill, who is probably most recognized as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, plays one of his darkest roles after a long time as The Major, a frosty, authoritative person who gets the boys to continue. Even though The Major seems to be the primary villain, Lawrence reveals that the real enemy is the oppressive state.
The production demanded not only emotional intensity but also extreme physical endurance. During San Diego Comic-Con, Garrett Wareing revealed that the cast collectively walked around 300 miles while production. “We’d walk three-quarters of a mile per take to keep the background consistent. By the end of the day, after resets and multiple takes, we’d have walked over a dozen miles,” Wareing explained. “At a certain point, we didn’t have to act the physical exhaustion, it was real.”
For Lawrence, the goal was not only to recreate the suspense and brutality of King’s vision, but also to preserve its thematic weight. King first published The Long Walk as a parable about the decay of the American dream, a topic that Lawrence feels is surprisingly still dominant today in 2025. Screenwriter JT Mollner also agreed with this statement, mentioning that their difficulty was to shorten King’s vast story but still keeping the heartfelt part intact. “There are too many great characters and moments to fit into one movie, so I focused on the DNA of the story and King’s original, chilling themes. If we kept those intact, we would succeed,” Mollner said.
Mark Hamill lauded the young cast of the movie for being able to carry the emotional weight of the story. “This movie belongs to them,” Hamill said. “From the leads to those with just one or two lines, even the extras, it all felt authentic. My role was just to occasionally terrorize them and be that irritating presence.” Despite not being on set during most of the boys’ scenes, Hamill said he was deeply moved when he saw the completed movie.
The journey to adapt The Long Walk has been long and winding. Back in 1988, George A. Romero was briefly considered to direct. Back in 2007, The Shawshank Redemption director Frank Darabont obtained the rights to the book, and he had a plan to turn it into a movie "someday" until the project fell apart. A version of the movie was sold to New Line Cinema in 2018 with André Øvredal as a director, but the final realization was done by Lionsgate with Lawrence leading and Mollner writing the screenplay.
The Long Walk is different from most of the dystopian thriller movies because of its part of entertainment of a very high tension and large scale along with a very intimate, character-driven drama. Although the dangerous "rules of the game" and the constant threat of being killed remain the source of suspense in the movie, the emotional side of the plot is fed by the new friends that are being made and then the betrayed ones among the boys. The physical pain that they go through makes it difficult for them to distinguish between the performance and reality, thus, the emotional points of the movie get even stronger.
Featuring a mix of savage survival stakes, social commentary, and humane storytelling, The Long Walk is definitely one of the most absorbing adaptations of Stephen King's works. Those who go to see this movie can have both a gut-wrenching cinematic experience and a story, which will still be with them after the end of the movie. On September 12, 2025, the movie will walk into theaters and for the fans of the psychological plus dystopian thriller combination, it will be a must-see event.
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