There will be more horror in 2025 as Lionsgate has just dated their feature take of Stephen King’s The Long Walk on the calendar for Sept 12 — that’s the weekend right after New Line opens The Conjuring: Last Rites over post Labor Day weekend.
In addition at their CinemaCon presentation this AM, Lionsgate dropped a trailer in the room.
How times have changed: in the very early pre-Covid names, studios wouldn’t think about putting two genre films next to each other, let alone on the same date like they did this past weekend with Blumhouse/Universal’s A Woman in the Yard and A24’s Death of a Unicorn.
This Lionsgate movie is different — it’s not a jump scare like The Conjuring, rather a dystopian horror movie from their Hunger Games guy Francis Lawrence.
Said Lawrence onstage today at the Lionsgate presentation, “This is my favorite Stephen King novel, I read it 27 years ago. The rights hot bought and then came back up. Roy Lee my producer brought it to me. For me, it was the conceit that was very interesting. You can imagine yourself in the shoes of these young men. World building –the heart of the movie for me is about these young men, their comraderies, the love that forms. This isn’t a try to knock each other out competition, but how we can hold each other up competition.”
The Long Walk takes place in the future in which 100 teenage boys embark on an annual competition known as “The Long Walk.” The rules are simple: maintain a speed above 4 miles per hour. Receive three warnings in an hour and you’re shot dead. The last one walking gets whatever he wants for the rest of his life. Under these grim circumstances the boys develop deep friendships despite knowing that each of their friends’ survival is a threat to their own. The book has the spirit of other King coming-of-age stories, following boys who prevail amid hardship and despair ala the characters in Stand by Me and It. King wrote the novel in 1979 under his then pseudonym Richard Bachman.
Cooper Hoffman, Charlie Plummer, Judy Greer, Mark Hamill and David Jonsson star.
Hamill is the antagonist, and he called the source material “nightmare inducing”.
“If you can’t me the hero, there’s nothing better than being the villain.”
Take not, it’s Hamill’s first CinemaCon.
“You don’t show up uninvited,” said the actor who played Luke Skywalker.
