It's walk or die in Stephen King's dystopian horror story The Long Walk. Only one winner can emerge and there is no finish line. Lionsgate has shared the brutal first trailer for the upcoming adaptation, releasing in cinemas this September.
If you thought jogging a few laps around your neighborhood was exhausting, imagine being tasked with walking until you can't anymore—and if you fall beneath 3 miles per hour, you die. The Long Walk is based on one of King's earliest written novels and initially published under his pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1979. In this futuristic America operating under a totalitarian regime, teenage boys are chosen to compete in an annual, televised event known as the Long Walk.
Various parties have tried adapting The Long Walk throughout the years, and passed through the hands of many creatives like George A. Romero, Frank Darabont, and André Øvredal, before finally ending up in the skilled hands of Francis Lawrence, best known for directing multiple films in another popular dystopian franchise, The Hunger Games.
Watch the first trailer shared by Lionsgate to get a sense of the kind of brutal world we'll be introduced to this fall.
Kids are fair game under this oppressive regime
The darkest and most brutal element of The Long Walk is the fact the film uses teenage boys as cannon fodder. Just like in The Hunger Games, kids are not guaranteed safety in this movie, and the initial trailer even teases the bloody deaths of a few characters.
Given the conceit of the Long Walk, we already know many will die. Mark Hamill plays the terrifying and authoritarian figure Major, who makes it known that only one of these boys can win, meaning the rest will be killed, either from falling below the 3 MPH rule and lagging behind, or for reasons we'll discover while watching the film.
There's no finish line, meaning these boys could be walking to the point of dehydration, and it's not just them that will be affected but their parents, too. The trailer shares a glimpse of Judy Greer's character, Ginny Garraty, her son, Raymond (Cooper Hoffman), is one of the many boys participating.
To make a movie like The Long Walk work, the actors and filmmakers will have to lean hard into the harsh reality and brutality of this kind of political and social climate. I think the trailer nails the cruelty of this world King has created and the barbarous nature of the game, and the duo of Lawrence and writer JT Mollner (Strange Darling) makes for a compelling pair. The trailer just solidified The Long Walk as one of my most anticipated films of the year. I'm also looking forward to David Jonsson's performance as he was a standout for me in last year's Alien: Romulus.
The Long Walk begins playing in theaters on September 12.