Fans Catch A Glimpse Of Stephen King’s ‘The Long Walk’, Starring Mark Hamill, At San Diego Comic-Con 2025
It appears that dystopian nightmares are en vogue this season as Lionsgate shared a 20-minute clip from The Long Walk by director Francis Lawrence (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 and Part 2) in Hall H at San Diego Comic Con this past weekend.
Adapted from the 1979 novel of the same name by Stephen King (under the pseudonym Richard Bachman), it tells of a broken society in the not-too-distant future where the most popular form of entertainment is watching an annual televised event called “The Long Walk.” It’s a contest where one hundred young men volunteer to walk along U.S. Highway 1 for a grueling 450 miles, and the boys must keep a minimum pace of 4 miles per hour at all times.
Falling below that speed for half a minute earns them one verbal warning by the soldiers monitoring their progress, and a third warning gets them a shotgun facelift.
King introduced the movie clip through a video message and stated, “It’s got some hard bark on it.” Remember, money also has a way of making people say things that reality can’t confirm. On the actual panel were the stars David Jonsson (Alien: Romulus), Garrett Wareing (Ransom Canyon), and Mark Hamill (Star Wars, The Guyver, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm). Joining them were the film’s producer, Roy Lee, and screenwriter JT Mollner (Strange Darling).
“I went through the entire book and underlined things that I wanted to keep. We wanted to keep the DNA and themes that Stephen King baked into his original novel. Even though he was writing about specific things at the time, I feel that relevance is generational, and wanted to make sure we had that. The beauty, love and the story of friendship along with the brutality of hopelessness and terror,” Mollner told Deadline.
He added, “We wanted to go all the way. I knew that Stephen King wanted us to go all the way. I knew Lionsgate wanted us to go all the way. If this book got into the wrong hands, studio or filmmakers. It could’ve been neutered. So, I’m very grateful we were able to keep the teeth that the book has.”
Mark Hamill, who plays the sadistic Major in the film, claims to have drawn inspiration from his own experience of growing up with his dad on a US naval base in Japan, where he saw high-ranking officers working soldiers into the ground under the hot sun until some of them vomited, and were forced to eat it.
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“I said, ‘I know who this guy is: I’ve seen him firsthand,” Hamill said (via Variety). “I’d walk across the parking lot, seeing the officers putting these guys through their paces in blazing hot sun, and they were just brutal.”
The 73-year-old actor flirted with retirement from live-action movies in 2019 after completing the Star Wars sequel trilogy, but then came back for the gothic drama series, The Fall of the House of Usher. What the extremely extroverted Hamill didn’t expect was for his costars to avoid him while they were filming.
The reason given is that the young professionals didn’t want to get too familiar with him while trying to act opposite such a ruthless antagonist. There’s also a chance that some of them only know Mark Hamill from his tweets over the past few years, and they were just keeping a polite distance.
“I had planned to have a get-together, where everybody would come over to the hotel,” Hamill told People about the early days of filming. But then he recounted that director Lawrence informed him, “Cooper [Hoffman] doesn’t want to meet you. … He’s afraid he’ll like you.”
This is the fourth time that Hollywood has tapped into the Bachman Books that King had written from 1977 until someone blew his cover in 1985. Two of them are based on the 1982 novel, The Running Man. The first one is a cult classic from 1987 that stars Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead role, and Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End) has just finished filming his adaptation of the story.
Then there’s the completely unappetizing adaptation of the 1984 novel, Thinner, from 1996, that’s nowhere near as disturbing as the source material it was derived from. Whether the movie world is ready to see the heartbreaking 2007 “trunk-novel,” Blaze, brought to the big screen is anybody’s guess. Still, everyone knows that nobody in that town has enough of a spinal column to adapt Richard Bachman’s greatest book, Rage (1977).
Richard Bachman’s The Long Walk hits theaters on September 12th. Until then, check out the new trailer below:
