NÃO PERCA: Streamin’ King: ‘The Long Walk’ Has Just As Much Heart as ‘Stand by Me’ and ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ 🍿
Streamin’ King is grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on streaming. This time we’re watching The Long Walk, the 2025 film based on the 1979 novel.
THE GIST: 50 young guys—one from each state—compete in a televised last-man-standing endurance challenge: walk at/above three miles per hour or get a warning; three warnings and you’re shot by the military convoy rolling along. Adaptation attempts have failed for decades. Arrives in a huge year of four King films (The Monkey, The Life of Chuck, The Long Walk, The Running Man) and two TV series, The Institute and IT: Welcome to Derry.
PEDIGREE: Directed by The Hunger Games franchise shepherd Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend, Constantine), penned by JT Mollner, writer/director of Strange Darling. Stars Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who broke out in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza in 2023, David Jonsson (Industry, Alien: Romulus), and Mark Hamill, mere months after he helped anchor Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck adaptation. Bringing the 50 walkers to life are excellent performances from Joshua Odjick, Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot, Charlie Plummer, Ben Wang, Jordan Gonzalez, and Roman Griffin Davis. Arrested Development legend Judy Greer is briefly here as Hoffman’s mom, and Josh Hamilton (13 Reasons Why) for a scene as his dad. Score by Grammy-nominee Jeremiah Fraites of the Lumineers and Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, cinematography by Jo Willems, Lawrence’s collaborator on the Hunger Games flicks. Executive produced by the one and only Stephen King.
WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? One million percent. While there’s no guaranteeing this will land on your SK Mount Rushmore, there’s a strong chance you’ll recognize it as one of the great feats of King adapting. It’s got shades of Stand by Me (period piece with boys bonding over a mission on foot) and a strong resemblance to The Shawshank Redemption, with the blooming love between Hoffman’s Ray Garraty and Jonsson’s Pete McVries. But just imagine if Red and Andy met at the five-minute mark and virtually never left the screen, or each other’s side.
There’s some fun meta talk from the character of Harkness, who contends the contest “will make one heck of an interesting book.” Plenty of lines either come right from the text or feel like they should, like Hank saying, “There are three great truths in the world: a good meal, a good screw, and a good shit.” Some fans have shown hesitancy at Francis Lawrence directing, under the pretense that the Hunger Games films are super tame (they’re not) or lame (definitely not), and Lawrence would PG-ify the darkness of this beloved, bleak-as-hell story. He uses a whole different bag of R-rated tricks here, and brings to life the exact Long Walk that paved the way for The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, and Squid Game. Not only is it not softened or modernized, it actually feels like something Frank Darabont would’ve made if he’d gotten it through production hell when he had the rights. It also feels like a movie Mike Flanagan would make, and in the realm of King adapting in the 21st century, there is no higher compliment. It’s exhilarating to see the care taken in getting this thing right. The ending does change, and it might be hard to square with Pete’s beautiful “choose love” speech, or maybe it fits right in line. There’s room for you to decide.
WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? Give it a shot. It’s a strong film that may or may not be your cup of tea, much more of a character study than an exploration of a dystopia, less obsessed with violence than the premise would suggest. Love among men is the name of the game, presented somewhere between hetero- and homoerotic, even with—or especially with—several guys making homophobic jabs. It was shot sequentially, with the actors actually walking for a few hundred miles, and you see the friendships and exhaustion forming in real time. Every walker with a speaking role brings something distinct to their character. Watching a bunch of young men walking for the entirety might have been dull; fortunately we’re also watching them encounter all sorts of signifiers of their loosely-defined, definitely depressed America along the way: decaying livestock, an eyeless cat, broken down farm equipment, fires aplenty, a crow crucified on a fence, little kids on bikes avidly anticipating an execution. Jeremiah Fraites’ score is moving, fairly minimal, and very varied. The story’s got incredibly emotional beats, defying you not to cry at least once or twice, especially when Judy Greer’s in the mix. You’ll also bear witness to a truly unique feat of production, one where the walking never, ever stops.
Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson are a revelation together, running through mountains of achingly human dialogue. Jonsson delivers numerous monologues that are life-affirming but never saccharine. Hopefully this won’t be the last we see of their pairing. In a delightful joint interview with GQ, Jonsson said, “There was a generation of actors back in the day, like people that we know now and we look up to. All these big actors that work with the same people on several different films. I would love that to be the case, if I’m lucky, with Cooper.” Mark Hamill is used sparsely but looms ever present, and delivers hilarious lines like, “I’m proud of you boys—ya got sack. Swing it heavy as ya come into these miles, heavy and long.” (The title card hitting 22 minutes in feels like some heavy sack-swinging for sure.) This would be a tragic movie to let your phone distract you. It’s also a shame cable isn’t really a thing anymore, because another place this film reflects Shawshank is that if you channel-flipped to it, you’d have to see it through to the end every time. And yes, it addresses the question of what happens when the walkers have to use the bathroom.
9 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:
1. “One of the conditions that Stephen [King] had, and actually it almost made it not work at Lionsgate, was because he wanted it to be contractual that it is a brutal, R-rated film. And they’ve never done a deal with a writer [like that],” producer Roy Lee says in the documentary Ever Onward: Making the Long Walk that comes with the physical and iTunes release.
2. The Long Walk and Edgar Wright’s The Running Man remake premiering two months apart is more than just a fun little fact. Both were published under King’s hard-edged pseudonym, Richard Bachman, and both are about televised competitions where contestants die horribly. While Running Man is specifically a game show, the Walk novel opens many chapters on quotes from actual classic programs, including Bob Barker on Truth or Consequences, Dick Clark on The $10,000 Pyramid, and Art Fleming on Jeopardy! I’ve written more about the significance of Bachman movies finishing out 2025—in the wake of the darkly comedic The Monkey and the wide-eyed The Life of Chuck—over here.
3. The term “shit-ass” gets thrown out here. Anecdotally, one of IT: Welcome to Derry’s most crowd-pleasing lines this fall was, “Welp, see you shit-asses in 27 years.”
4. Joshua Odjick, 24, and Mark Hamill, 74, both double-dipped on King adaptations this year, the former as Taniel in Welcome to Derry, the latter as Albie in The Life of Chuck. Here’s each of them talking about it:
Odjick, to Popternative:
“I feel like Taniel and Collie’s hair is very present and that’s what I like to think that I brought that was the same [for both roles]. But Taniel and Collie are two different sides of the same coin. One stands up for others, is more righteous that way, then the other one is self-righteous where he’s doing it for his own greed. Collie wanted to win and things started changing as he started losing friends and realizing [he was] isolated. Taniel is more protective, he has a mission; he was basically groomed to be a medicine man to protect that area of the woods, he doesn’t want to let his ancestors down. It’s been through generations and millennia and he has a responsibility.”
Hamill, to Parade:
“I was going to the Toronto International Film Festival where we’re going to see The Life of Chuck for the first time, and just minutes before we’re going out, they said, ‘Oh, you’re sitting next to Stephen King.’ I went, ‘What? I’m a fanboy. I gotta keep it together.’ And I walked to the seat. He was already seated, and he looked up, and he said, ‘The Major. How do you do?’ My thought process was, ‘How in the world does he know?’ We hadn’t shot [The Long Walk] yet. I asked the Lionsgate people, ‘What’s going on?’ They said, ‘Oh, no, he knows. He has casting approval, director approval, script approval.’ … I was shocked that he knew who I was at all, and then to know specifically what character I was playing, it was a thrill.”
Hamill also appeared, uncredited, in 1992’s Sleepwalkers, at the request of many-time King adapter Mick Garris. The Star Wars legend said last June that he “did it on a whim” and “almost forgot about it” in the intervening years. In September, he told the New Yorker about his favorite SK books: The Shining (“the first King book I ever read, and it’s the one that made me a gigantic fan”), The Dead Zone (“such a fantastic premise”), It (“he doesn’t write above the common man, and it’s easy to put yourself in the place of the characters”), and On Writing (“exactly what I would have wanted to know if we had gone out to dinner”).
5. Other return visitors to the Kingverse include Judy Greer (Mrs. Desjardin in 2013’s Carrie) and producer Roy Lee, who has quietly become a SK adaptation powerhouse since 2017’s IT. He did the sequel and Welcome to Derry, plus 2024’s Salem’s Lot, 2020-21’s The Stand, and 2019’s Doctor Sleep. Lee is also involved with Netflix’s Cujo remake (which could be helmed by Darren Aronofsky) and at least two series that may or may not happen: The Tommyknockers and The Eyes of the Dragon.
6. The rights to The Long Walk were previously held by George A. Romero (Creepshow, The Dark Half) and Frank Darabont, who gave fans the hall-of-fame threepeat of The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist. (And for those wondering where he’s been, Darabont came out of unofficial retirement to direct some of the King-tastic Stranger Things 5.)
7. Collie references the Charge of the Light Brigade, a Crimean War assault immortalized in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem. This gets multiple nods in the Dark Tower series.
8. In King’s 1998 novel Bag of Bones, writer protagonist Mike Noonan has a character named Raymond Garraty.
9. The physical release contains an alternate ending that changes one key moment, then offers a new epilogue via onscreen text. One ending hits like the hammer-blow at the end of Darabont’s The Mist—I won’t say which, but will note that neither one directly adapts the novel.
CRITICAL CONSENSUS: Rotten Tomatoes critics have it at 88 percent, fans rated it 85 percent. Slate judged The Long Walk to be “the leanest, meanest adaptation of [King’s] work in a long time,” while the Guardian said it’s “surely one of the grimmest mainstream movies we’ve had for some time” and “a cross between a buddy movie and a horror movie—a war movie without the war.” Bloody Disgusting also found it a superlative SK film, and put it plainly: “The Long Walk hurts. Even the characters we barely see or interact with instill pangs of sorrow and heartbreak, each succumbing to horrific fates that snuff out youthful dreams far too early.”
Consequence was less impressed with “a lot of characters who feel more like loose sketches than fully-realized personalities, and a narrative that maybe has some minor pacing problems towards the end, but is pretty impossible to turn away from.” RogerEbert.com noted King’s Vietnam parallels, deeming it “a work about the terror of the draft, where young men are sent off to die at the behest of military orders, while an aghast American public watches on their TVs.” The A.V. Club called it “a grungy, sweaty, Walter Hill-like slog through hell” and “relatable viewing for an entire country afflicted by economic insecurity, unchecked gun violence, and the invasion of a militarized Gestapo.”
On the Losers’ Club podcast, Justin Gerber said the team “really won the lottery with this young ensemble,” postulating that “if you swapped out this ensemble with literally any other horror movie ensemble of the last…20 years, it’s not gonna work.” On the same episode, Dan Pfleegor said, “We’re marching along with these guys. We almost feel like we’re in rhythm with them. We could be one of the boys that’s just next to them kind of peering in. So it’s very voyeuristic, this film. And I thought that’s a really good way of showing that war is a lot of extreme violence right away, and then a lot of boredom in between.”
We’ll throw to Stephen King Cast to wrap up:
“Think about how much time we spend just watching them walk and talk—you’d think that this might be boring, but it really was some of the most exhilarating storytelling that I have seen this year. … The point is not hurtling towards the ending of this, it is very much the journey that’s the important part. Death is not the important part, life is the important part. And so the movie itself, and everything leading up to that [ending], all of those conversations, the thrilling nature of the movie itself—the character work, the writing work, the performances, the relationships, the philosophies—it was all so effective that even if the ending isn’t great, it doesn’t take anything away for me.”
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR THE LONG WALK (1979): The first novel King started that would ultimately get published, begun as a college freshman with the fresh horror and stupidity of Vietnam on his mind, not released until five years after he debuted with 1974’s Carrie. Walk arrived the same year as The Dead Zone, preceded in 1978 by The Stand and Night Shift, followed in ’80 by Firestarter. His second of six pseudonymous Richard Bachman novels, accompanied by Rage (1977), Roadwork (’81), The Running Man (’82), Thinner (’84), The Regulators (’96), and Blaze (2007).
Zach Dionne makes Stephen King things on Patreon and just finished recapping IT: Welcome to Derry for Decider.
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