US EditionMovie Review: 'Long Walk' Captures Timeless Stephen King Tension
The film portrays 50 lottery-chosen participants enduring a deadly continuous walk for a grand prize, highlighting themes of endurance, compassion, and societal desperation.
- On September 12, 2025, The Long Walk opens, directed by Francis Lawrence with a script from J.T. Mollner and starring Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson, adapting Stephen King 's early novel.
- After decades in development purgatory, Stephen King began the haunting tale as a young writer, with several directors including Frank Darabont attempting adaptations before Francis Lawrence.
- The film lays out the rules up front: Walkers must maintain a 3 miles per hour pace and receive three warnings before soldiers execute lagging contestants with graphic headshots, while the last walker wins untold riches.
- Reviewers predict awards talk for The Long Walk, calling it a top 2025 Stephen King adaptation with Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson earning Oscar buzz amid high ratings.
- Beyond horror, it probes the emotional interior lives of young men, making Stephen King's metaphor literal and resonating with 2025 societal contexts about desperation and debt.
23 Articles
23 Articles
The Long Walk Review
It may not have been the first book the Master of Horror ever published, but The Long Walk was the first novel Stephen King ever wrote. Written during the height of the Vietnam War, it’s a fascinating, primal keystone text for understanding the lens through which King sees the world, and all that remains relevant about the text - translated faithfully by director Francis Lawrence and screenwriter JT Mollner - allows this long-overdue adaptation …
'The Long Walk' Is The King Of The Dystopian Thriller
It feels counterintuitive, not to mention glib, to say that The Long Walk is arriving late to any trend, but that’s a bit what it feels like to be watching this adaptation in the year 2025.Stephen King’s “first” novel — the one he wrote at the ripe age of 19 but didn’t publish until years later — is one of many stories about a dangerous game enforced by a totalitarian regime. The book is favored by King aficionados the world over, but it was als…
Stephen King refuses to compromise with the brutality necessary for his work. The seventy-seven-year-old author recently revealed that he had set a non-negotiable condition for the film adaptation of The Long Walk: explicitly show teenagers being shot down. King denounces the current tendency of superhero films to present a sweetened violence, which he describes as "almost pornographic" by his absence ... Read more The article King criticizes bl…
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- 40% of the sources lean Left, 40% of the sources are Center
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