How long do you think you can walk without stopping? Personally, I can do about five miles before my back starts to act up — which wouldn’t bode well for me in Stephen King’s The Long Walk. It doesn’t bode well for the young men in the new adaptation of the dystopian story either, as the upcoming film has finally dropped its first trailer.
Directed by The Hunger Games helmer Francis Lawrence, the film highlights six young men in a dystopian alternate version of the United States, where every year a group of men compete to walk the farthest, until only one of them is left. The twist? If you stop walking, you die. The film stars Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Ben Wang, Charlie Plummer, Garrett Wareing, and Tut Nyuot as the young men, alongside Judy Greer and Mark Hamill.
The Long Walk is one of numerous novels King published under his famous pseudonym, Richard Bachman — a list that also, ironically, includes The Running Man, which is also being adapted into a film this year. Originally published in 1979, King cites it as the first novel he ever wrote sometime in the late 1960s, years before Carrie ever hit shelves, and was initially collected in 1985’s The Bachman Books, before finally getting a standalone hardcover release in 2023, courtesy of Centipede Press.
It has, not to use a terrible pun, been an extremely long walk to get this particular Kind adaptation to the screen. Zombie icon George A. Romero was approached in the late 1980s to direct a version of the story, but it never materialized — nor did Frank Darabont’s vision for the story, after he purchased the rights in 2007. When this version was initially announced in 2019, The Last Voyage of the Demeter director André Øvredal was set to direct, before Lawrence took over duties in 2023.
The Long Walk debuts in theaters on September 12. Check out the new trailer below.
