Stephen King movies have been drawing in crowds at the box office for decades, but in a strange twist of fate, 2025 has seen not one but two of the author’s “Bachman Books” come to fruition on the big screen. In November, Glen Powell will run for his life in The Running Man, but before that, The Long Walk has gone from stomping all over the box office to debuting at the top of the iTunes chart after its digital release earlier this week.
The Long Walk was published by King under the name of Richard Bachman in 1979 and for many years was a novel that remained unfilmed as many believed it would just not make a watchable movie. However, under the direction of Francis Lawrence, the dystopian survival thriller has become one of the best reviewed King movies of the last three decades, and turned a $20 million budget into a $55 million gross to boot.
Set in a dystopian alternate reality in the 1970s, the movie focuses on an annual televised event – similar in many ways to The Running Man’s central plot device. This event is a marathon with no end, which sees a group of fifty boys being forced to walk at a speed of three miles per hour constantly. Anyone falling below the speed, and not heeding the warnings of the armed military presence traveling alongside them, is brutally killed. The Long Walk only ends when a single boy remains, and they win a wish of their choice and riches to see them through the rest of their life.
The Long Walk scored an impressive initial Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes (you can read our review of the movie here), peaking in the high 90s before slipping slightly to 88%, where is stands now. Audiences were similarly responsive to the movie, rating it 85% on the aggregate site. Whether being praised for its script, actors, or its startling relevance in today’s world right now, The Long Walk is now continuing its dominance with an impressive digital debut to add to its weighty worldwide box office.
Making ‘The Long Walk’ Engaging Was No Easy Task
If there was one simple reason that no one attempted to make The Long Walk into a movie before, it was that watching a group of young men walking and being killed off one at a time for over 100 minutes does not necessarily sound like the most engrossing way to spend your afternoon. However, for the movie’s editor, Mark Yoshikawa, that was just part of the challenge. He told Movieweb:
“I knew that was gonna be one of the challenges editing from the beginning. In fact, the book, you know, they’re just walking. There’s not much of a plot this movie. It can be described in one sentence, right? And so every scene was going to be walking. And if this was in a living room, it would be a boring scene… but you’re constantly having that motion…
“The one thing also about this film, is you couldn’t move things out of order and rearrange things as you normally would as an editor, because people died in a certain order. It started off with 50, and it gets less and less and less. I think there’s also on the big screen something visceral about that of seeing a crowd of people, and it’s all this activity, and all this foley that they had to shoot, and all this, you know, people talking, and then by the end, you just feel like it’s a dozen, and then it’s 10, and then it’s three.”
The Long Walk is available now on all digital VOD platforms. The Running Man will be released in cinemas on November 14, 2025.