Spoilers follow for the Stephen King novels The Long Walk and The Running Man, as well as for The Long Walk movie and the original The Running Man movie. The Long Walk is out on Friday, September 12, and The Running Man hits on November 14.
It’s not odd to have an adaptation of a Stephen King book hit theaters. The prolific horror author has had numerous movies and TV shows made out of his work for decades now. What is weird is that within two months of each other, two adaptations of Stephen King books are coming out that are eerily similar.
The Long Walk, which hits theaters on September 12, and The Running Man, which hits theaters on November 14, are both King adaptations that he wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bachman and which feature dystopian future death games based around moving your legs in some fashion. They were also released in book stores within years of each other – 1979 versus 1982 – and have, in various fashions, been in development as movies for years (The Running Man had a prior adaptation released in 1987).
So with that in mind, which Stephen King adaptation of a dystopian future death game about locomotion is right for you? Let’s break down various aspects of both books and movies so you can properly figure out whether you should run, walk, or not go at all to the movie theater this fall.
What Are the Books (and Movies) About?
Despite the bizarre similarities between the two, they veer off in specific ways that we’ll get more into in a second. But to lay a little groundwork here, The Long Walk takes place in an unnamed year in the future, after society has pretty much collapsed. Each year, 100 kids gather to complete “The Long Walk,” which is exactly what it sounds like: They keep walking, at least four miles per hour, until only one of them is left. There are various other rules to the game, but basically, if you get three warnings, you’re out. And if you’re out, you’re shot dead by the soldiers following along. On the other hand, the lucky “winner” gets whatever he wants as a prize for the rest of his life.
The movie version, directed by Francis Lawrence, whittles the group down to a more manageable 50 contestants, aka one per state, and lowers the speed to a minimum of three miles per hour. The prize is unlimited riches for the rest of your life plus one wish. But otherwise, the movie is a relatively faithful adaptation of the novella.
The Running Man, meanwhile, takes place in the far future of – get this – 2025. America is a dystopian wreck, ruled by a fascist dictatorship that keeps the populace placated with TV game shows. The most popular is The Running Man, where, in order to win a billion dollars, you need to stay alive for 30 days while tracked by “Hunters.” Like The Long Walk, there are more rules, but nobody survives for 30 days, and often not for longer than a day, because American citizens get money for reporting on the whereabouts of the contestants.
The 1987 movie version starring Arnold Schwarzenegger kept some of those trappings, as well as the name of the main character, Ben Richards. But a lot from the book was changed to make it a blockbuster, action-focused Schwarzenegger movie. Also, they moved it to take place even earlier in time, in 2017, which is sort of hilarious.
The new 2025 version is reportedly far more faithful to the book and is directed by Shaun of the Dead’s Edgar Wright (though, full disclosure, we haven’t seen that one yet).
Origins of The Long Walk and The Running Man, and the Bachman of It All
While The Long Walk was released in 1979, it was actually the first novel King ever wrote: He began crafting it when he was a freshman in college in 1966. The Long Walk is a not-so-shaded allegory for the Vietnam War, with young men sent off to die thanks to a lottery, so given that timeline, at the height of the anti-war movement, you can see why this was top of mind for the young King. The Long Walk wasn’t the first book he had published – that would be Carrie in 1974 – but since then it’s been collected in The Bachman Books, which contains four of the novels King published under the pen name.
The Running Man, meanwhile, was released in 1982 and has nothing to do with the dance craze of the same name, which Paula Abdul created in the late 1980s. According to King in On Writing, his combo instruction manual and memoir released in 2002, he wrote the whole of The Running Man in a week. At the time, King was jamming out a ton of novels… But even at his regular fast pace, 219 pages in seven days is faster than Ben Richards runs in the book. It was also collected in The Bachman Books in 1985.
As for the Bachman of it all, King explains why he wrote the novels under the pen name in the FAQ on his website. “I did that because back in the early days of my career there was a feeling in the publishing business that one book a year was all the public would accept,” King writes.
Since King could write a whole lot more than one book a year (see above re: one book in a week), he convinced his publisher to release the Bachman books without fanfare so that he could see how they would sell compared to his regular books – and even created fake details like a bio and backstory for the “writer,” as well as an author photo featuring Richard Manuel, a friend of King’s literary agent.
King also adds in the FAQ that “eventually the public got wise to this because you can change your name but you can't really disguise your style.” While your mileage may vary on that, it’s generally considered that King’s Bachman books are, if you can believe it, even nastier than the books written under his real name. They contain harsher obscenities and are often much grimmer than his King-penned novels.
Years later, Joe Hillström King would attempt a similar experiment, writing under a pen name starting in 1997, and eventually revealing himself to be Stephen King’s son in 2007. That pen name? Joe Hill, writer of, among other things, Locke & Key, NOS4A2, and The Black Phone.
How the Games Are Played
We touched on this earlier, but the actual physical execution of the games is vastly different, despite the similar seeming setup. In The Long Walk, it’s an endurance test. To get more in the weeds, the walk does not stop, day and night, until one winner remains. The group of men who are technically volunteers, though everyone volunteers for the lottery, are given water and food supplies. But they’re also given a warning if they drop below the minimum speed. After three warnings, they’re killed. If they walk for an hour with no warnings, they lose a warning and can get back down to zero warnings. The “game” continues until there is one winner, so technically it goes on as long as it needs to.
In the movie version, we’re told The Long Walk is being broadcast out to the entire country, and the event is there because it inspires America to greatness again – the GDP increases every year after a Long Walk winner is declared. But for the most part, like in the book, the boys are walking through mostly empty roads in a dilapidated America.
The Running Man, meanwhile, is explicitly televised as a TV game show on The Games Network, hosted by a man named Bobby Thompson – think Caesar Flickerman from The Hunger Games meets Bob Barker, and you get the drift. Multiple contestants are running at a time, and they’re given a few thousand dollars in cash and a video camera, as well as a 12-hour head start. After that time, their only goal is to survive however they can as they’re tracked by the Hunters. They get $100 per hour for staying alive, $100 dollars for every law enforcement officer or Hunter they kill, and the aforementioned billion dollars if they stay alive for 30 days (which never happens).
In addition, Running Man contestants have to send two videotaped messages a day back to the studio for broadcast, or they lose. As our “hero” Ben Richards quickly learns when he tries to expose the contest as a sham, TGN has no issues editing that footage if need be.
Who Is Making the Movies?
To take a little swerve from the books, let’s talk about who is involved in the movie versions, which should hopefully inform your decision to walk or run (to theaters, not in general).
The Running Man remake/adaptation first cropped up when director Edgar Wright mentioned he’d be interested in making it in 2017 on X (formerly known as Twitter), but it didn’t get officially announced until 2021, marking the first time in history something on Twitter reflected reality. (Just kidding. Maybe.) Anyway, Wright directed and co-wrote the movie with Michael Bacall, with Glen Powell starring as Richards. Unlike the overly muscled Schwarzenegger from the 1987 adaptation, Powell is a completely ripped and chiseled specimen of human perfection, aka relatively closer to the wiry mess of a human from the novel, but still, let’s be honest, Hollywood-ized.
The new movie also features Lee Pace as Powell’s main adversary, Colman Domingo as the MC, Josh Brolin as the not-at-all-evily named producer Dan Killian, Michael Cera, William H. Macy, and, in a perhaps mild coincidence, one of the stars of Netflix’s Locke & Key, Emilia Jones.
The Long Walk, meanwhile, comes from a guy who knows something about teen death games: Francis Lawrence, who has directed every Hunger Games movie since Catching Fire. The cast isn’t quite as flashy as The Running Man, though it does star Mark Hamill as The Major, aka the gruff military man who lords over the “game.” Judy Greer also stars as the mother of the main character, Ray Garraty, who is played by the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s son, Cooper Hoffman. David Jonnson, who has been lauded for his performances in Alien: Romulus and Rye Lane, among others, co-stars as Ray’s best friend during the Walk, Peter McVries. Ben Wang, the new Karate Kid, also appears in the cast as one of the contestants.
The Societal Resonance and Themes
As mentioned earlier, King explicitly wrote The Long Walk about the Vietnam War, and the movie nods to that – or at least doesn’t contradict the themes – thanks to an aesthetic that embraces a mix of ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and occasionally Dust Bowl looks for the characters and settings. However, it’s hard not to watch The Long Walk and think specifically about the present day, as well. The Hunger Games may have been a little early in our real-world timeline to think of Panem and the Games as anything other than a faraway warning. In 2025’s The Long Walk, Lawrence is nodding towards a totalitarian America just past an economic and societal collapse that, in today’s fraught times, doesn’t seem as unfathomable as it once might have.
That certainly comes through with Hamill’s The Major, who never says “Make America Great Again” but does talk gruffly about bringing America back to its glory days thanks to the sacrifice of a few brave young boys. It’s clear as they walk the road that this is an America that is never coming back, and 49 teens dying isn’t going to fix anything… Instead, they will be worn out and tossed off with the promises of immeasurable riches that only one person a year can get, and ultimately are not shared with anyone else.
The Running Man, meanwhile, was always ahead of its time – but now is also a little too late in 2025. Themes of a totalitarian dictatorship have always been present in fiction, but the idea of reality TV didn’t really take off until the ’90s, and it wasn’t until the 2000s, with the premiere of Survivor, that we actually got anything close to a death game, even though nobody actually died on the reality series (that we know of…!). But even the tech mentioned in Running Man was ahead of its time: Camcorders didn’t really become any sort of thing until the mid-’80s, and even then they were tape-based.
The greatest science fiction ever gets is in portraying a world that's a shadowy reflection of our own, scenarios that warn us about the end of the path we're currently on. The world we live in now is full of debates around news organizations ditching journalism in favor of state propaganda and the government overseeing arts institutions like the Kennedy Center or national museums like The Smithsonian, while the National Guard has been deployed to our own cities. In that sense, Stephen King's visions of reality-show based authoritarianism are more relevant than ever.
Body Count and Violence
Okay, enough about themes and junk, what if you just want to watch people die? Mild spoilers here that you can probably figure out for yourself, but at least 49 of 50 kids die in The Long Walk, same as 99 out of 100 die in the novella. There’s plenty of gunfire and visceral violence in the movie version, but none of it is cool at all. It’s horrifying and presented mostly in full frame by Lawrence and company. Unlike The Hunger Games movies, which certainly sat on deaths but straddled the uncomfortable line between criticizing the entertainment and being entertaining for the real audience in the movie theaters, there’s nothing fun about any of the deaths in The Long Walk movie.
Again, we haven’t seen The Running Man yet, but the trailers are certainly selling it as a classic Edgar Wright good time at the theaters. There’s a big difference there, too, which is that we’re watching the bad guys die, killed either by Powell’s Ben Richards or one of his allies (or competitors). Despite the lack of Schwarzenegger, The Running Man is both critical of our entertainment and aiming to be entertaining, per the pulp novel ethos of Richard Bachman. Will the final film end up being morose? Possibly. But based on the footage we’ve seen, there’s going to be plenty of cops and hunters dying, and lots of the kinetic action scenes Wright has made his bread and butter in everything from Baby Driver to Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. It’s not likely to be the purposefully grim slog of The Long Walk.
Bring on the Bad Guys
A movie is only as good as its villain, and both movies have a few doozies. Mark Hamill is definitely in his horror baddie era, thanks to playing always-sunglass-wearing The Major in The Long Walk and his turn in Mike Flanagan’s Netflix adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher. It’s always fun to see Luke Skywalker flex those acting muscles, though he’s not quite as over-the-top as his iconic villain role as the voice of The Joker.
The Running Man, meanwhile, has a murderer’s row (figuratively) of talent taking on Glen Powell. Lee Pace is chewing up scenery currently in Foundation and seems like the perfect foil for Powell as the lead Hunter. Josh Brolin, as a producer and really the bad guy behind the other bad guys, is a great choice – and you may remember he’s successfully played at least one iconic villain before, as Thanos in the MCU. And Colman Domingo, who is on a heater right now, as the TV host? Heck yeah.
The End
We’re definitely getting into spoilers here, but one aspect of the movies that is worth discussing is the end. We noted that Bachman’s books tend to be nihilistic, and The Long Walk and The Running Man definitely bear that forward. The Long Walk does indeed end with one contestant winning, and then wandering off into the dark, permanently damaged. The Running Man, meanwhile, ends with a dying Ben Richards ramming a plane into The Games Network skyscraper, blowing up the nerve center of The Running Man to help save society while sacrificing his own life.
As for The Long Walk movie, Lawrence and company do make some critical changes to the ending that don’t soften the blow, but tie into the subtle differences they made for the screen adaptation. It’s hard to watch, and it doesn’t pull any punches.
And as for The Running Man? Not to be blunt, but it’s going to take a lot of cajones on Wright’s part to end a movie with an airplane crashing into a skyscraper, post 9/11. The 1987 version featured Richards crashing a car into the studio and making out with his love interest, which… didn’t really solve anything. So expect the 2025 Running Man to hit somewhere in the middle of those two points – or land somewhere entirely different.
Running vs. Walking
The most important factor when determining which of these movies you should see in theaters… Do you prefer running or walking? If you want to get somewhere fast and be a little out of breath, while getting your heart racing, then running is the way to go. If you prefer to take your time while breathing some fresh air and stretching the ‘ol legs, then walking is your travel method of choice.
Either way, it’s a great time to be a Stephen King fan – sorry, Richard Bachman fan. And there’s another option, of course: You could always drive a car, like in Christine.
