The movie adaptation of Stephen King‘s The Long Walk took over Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con today, featuring a panel with screenwriter JT Mollner (Strange Darling), cast members David Jonsson, Mark Hamill, Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot, Charlie Plummer, and producer Roy Lee. The panel included a Q&A with the cast and filmmakers, as well as a new trailer giving fans a fresh look at the adaptation based on King’s dystopian horror drama. Directed by Francis Lawrence (Constantine, The Hunger Games franchise), the brutal and bleak story will challenge audiences with the question: “How far could you go?”
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The Long Walk was the first novel King ever wrote when he was 19 years old in 1967. The novel was initially published under his short-lived pseudonym, Richard Bachman, in 1979.
Mollner and Lawrence recently revealed that the master of horror “seemed very pleased” after screening The Long Walk, receiving the most important stamp of approval. The novel has long been considered one of King’s “unfilmable” stories, partly due to the dark subject matter and the often internal characteristics of the book. The filmmakers shared earlier this month how they learned from previously scrapped attempts at adapting the novel and stuck with keeping the story fresh while striving to honor the original source material.
“We love this book,” Mollner told Empire Magazine. “We love Stephen King. We want to make sure all his themes of hopelessness and the cycle of violence stayed the way it was in the book. But we wanted to also do some things that would surprise the audience, so it wasn’t just a play.”
Several filmmakers have tried to adapt The Long Walk for the big screen over the years, including the late George A. Romero, Frank Darabont, and André Øvredal to no avail. King told Vanity Fair in May that the “merciless quality” of his book is likely why previous efforts proved unsuccessful.
The Long Walk movie centers on Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) and Peter McVries (David Jonsson) among a large ensemble cast as they participate in a televised, deadly annual walking contest in a dystopian America. Overseen by The Major (Mark Hamill), the grueling walk only ends when there is one survivor remaining. The large group of young men marching with no real destination is whittled down one by one if they fail to maintain a pace of more than three miles per hour, they try to escape, or their bodies give out. If their speed slows, they receive up to three warnings to resume their pace before being immediately executed by one of The Major’s soldiers monitoring the walk.
The Long Walk will be released in theaters on September 12th.
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