How to watch The Long Walk in New Zealand
Stephen King’s bleakest book is making its box office bow.
Well, it’s been a long time coming, and it’s passed through many hands—including, at various times, horror maestros George A. Romero and Frank Darabont. But we’re finally getting a screen adaptation of one of Stephen King’s bleakest novels, The Long Walk.
How to watch The Long Walk in New Zealand
The Long Walk is screening in New Zealand cinemas from September 11, 2025.
What is The Long Walk about?
In a fascist United States (well, that could mean anything these days…) an annual competition sees a group of young men—boys, really—embark on a long distance walking competition down the East coast, starting in Maine. The competition ends when there’s only one left alive. There’s a couple of trucks full of soldiers trundling along with them, whose job it is to blow the brains out of anyone who falls below the three-mile-an-hour minimum speed limit too many times. And all but one will meet that fate.
Published in 1979 under King’s Richard Bachman nom de plume, The Long Walk was actually the big fella’s first novel, written while at uni in the ’60s. It’s a singularly angry work, and if you want to read it as a Vietnam War parable? Well, it’s hard not to. Francis Lawrence is on directing duties, and given he directed all but one instalment of The Hunger Games, he’s on familiar ground here.
The cast of The Long Walk
Lawrence has assembled a pretty stellar collection of young talent for this one, including Cooper Hoffman as everyman protagonist Raymond Garraty; Alien: Romulus‘s David Jonsson as Peter McVries; Garrett Wareing as Stebbins; Joshua Odjick as Collie Parker; Tut Nyuot as Arthur Baker; Charlie Plummer as Gary Barkovitch Ben Wang as Hank Olson; and Roman Griffin Davis as Thomas Curley. Just don’t get too attached.
And in the key role of the Major, the figurehead of the military junta that rules the former US, we have the mighty Mark Hamill making his second Stephen King adaptation this year after The Life of Chuck.
The Long Walk trailer
Why we’re excited about The Long Walk
Stephen King fans have been waiting so long for this, it’d take an uncommon act of will to resist checking it out.
