Screenwriter JT Mollner (Strange Darling) and director Francis Lawrence (Constantine, The Hunger Games franchise) are the latest filmmakers to tackle a Stephen King book that was once thought unfilmable with their upcoming dystopian horror drama The Long Walk. The novel was the first King ever wrote in 1967 when he was 19, and it was initially published under his short-lived pseudonym, Richard Bachman, in 1979. The often internal characteristics within the brutal and bleak book have made an adaptation tricky, as others have found since the novel’s publication. Luckily, The Long Walk has received the most important stamp of approval from none other than the mastermind behind the story himself.
The filmmakers recently spoke to Empire Magazine in their latest issue about their take on King’s arguably darkest dystopian tale, confirming the master of horror “seemed very pleased” after watching the movie. So, how did they make the impossible possible? Mollner and Lawrence explained to the outlet that their process of nailing down their big-screen version of The Long Walk included scrapping any previous scripts from the various attempts that have been made to adapt the book over the years and learning from them. “I read some of them,” Lawrence said, who used the opportunity to pick apart issues and noted the “trickiness of the adaptation process.”
Additionally, the filmmakers wanted to honor King’s novel while also keeping the story fresh, especially considering the premise of The Long Walk and how to make this type of narrative work on-screen. “We love this book,” Mollner said. “We love Stephen King. We want to make sure all his themes of hopelessness and the cycle of violence stayed the way it was in the book. But we wanted to also do some things that would surprise the audience, so it wasn’t just a play.”
For decades, several filmmakers have sought to crack the code on adapting The Long Walk, including George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead, Creepshow), Frank Darabont (The Mist, The Shawshank Redemption), and André Øvredal (The Autopsy of Jane Doe, The Last Voyage of the Demeter). None of those attempts proved successful, and King recently offered his theory as to why. Speaking to Vanity Fair in May, King feels the “merciless quality” of the book halted development on every previous effort. “I think maybe what held it back in those other adaptations is that merciless quality,” King said. “Somebody putting down the money for it must’ve been, like, ‘I don’t know…this is hard. This is a painful one.’”
Not only were Mollner and Lawrence up for the challenge, but everything seemed to fall into place to finally make the adaptation a reality. “I wasn’t aware of the fact that everybody had tried to make it over the course of 30 years,” Mollner told Empire Magazine. “Which is probably a good thing. It’s Hollywood folklore. Part of it was just naivety, thinking that it wouldn’t be a problem.”
“A couple of years ago, I saw the book sitting on my shelf in the hallway of my house and wondered what happened to the film version,” Lawrence added. “That same day, [producer] Roy Lee called me and asked me if I would be interested in directing. Quite honestly, sometimes adaptations develop for years and years and years. Sometimes it never happens. This was so fast. It all just kind of happened in a way that is very, very rare.”
The Long Walk movie centers on Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) and Peter McVries (David Jonsson) among a large ensemble cast as they participate in a televised, deadly annual walking contest in a dystopian America. Overseen by The Major (Mark Hamill), the grueling walk only ends when there is one survivor remaining. The large group of young men marching with no real destination is whittled down one by one if they fail to maintain a pace of more than three miles per hour, they try to escape, or their bodies give out. If their speed slows, they receive up to three warnings to resume their pace before being immediately executed by one of The Major’s soldiers monitoring the walk.
The Long Walk will arrive in theaters on September 12th, 2025.
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