One of Stephen King's weirdest unfilmed books just started filming
After more than 30 years of attempts, King's The Long Walk has begun filming, with Cooper Hoffman in a starring role
Photo: The Long Walk star Cooper Hoffman, photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images
Every now and then, you run into a piece of casting news that’s less interesting in terms of the actual information being conveyed—i.e., “Mark Hamill and Judy Greer have been cast, in undisclosed roles, in Lionsgate’s attempts to adapt Stephen King novel The Long Walk“—and more because it reminds you of a particularly shocking fact. I.e., “Wait, they’re trying to make a movie out of The Long Walk, possibly the single most fucked-up book in King’s entire body of work, again?”
That’s where we’re at tonight, and with no disrespect meant to Greer and Hamill, who will, presumably, be filling in ably in two of the fairly limited number of adult roles in the original King story. Or, should we say, the Bachman story: King published the book in 1979 under the Richard Bachman pseudonym, which King fans will know typically got attached to some of his most aggressively bleak work. (Only Pet Sematary, and 2014’s Revival, really compare, to our minds, from the official “King” novels.) The Long Walk is a nasty piece of work even by Bachman standards, presaging a whole bunch of more recent YA works where teenagers compete in deadly competitions, albeit with a much more simple premise than your various Hungers games and runnered Mazes: 100 teenage boys stand at the U.S. border with Canada one morning. They start walking. If they slow down too many times, they’re shot. Last kid standing wins.
This particular adaptation of the book has apparently been kicking around since 2023, when Lionsgate announced that Trollhunter director André Øvredal, previously attached to an adaptation, was being replaced with frequent Hunger Games helmer Francis Lawrence. Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson are set to star, with one of them—we’re guessing Hoffman—presumably playing the role of Ray Garrity, the character who King uses as our window into the increasingly hellish ordeal of the Walk as it stretches out across multiple days. Filming on Lawrence’s version apparently started yesterday, which is pretty notable, in so far as people (including George Romero and Frank Darabont) have been trying to get an adaptation of this thing off the ground for more than 30 years.
We’ll be honest, as genuine fans of the source material: We have no idea what this movie ends up looking like. A major part of the book’s appeal is how much of a wretched slog it can be: It really just is about guys walking until their bodies give out, and tons of its conflicts are almost entirely internal.