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Posted in: Lionsgate, Movies | Tagged: francis lawrence, lionsgate, The Long Walk
The Long Walk Director on Crafting an Original Ending
Francis Lawrence's adaptation of The Long Walk keeps Stephen King's brutal premise while carefully reshaping the ending.
Article Summary
- Francis Lawrence reshapes The Long Walk's ending, offering a fresh take while keeping King's brutal premise.
- The film surprises by centering the climax on Garraty and McVries, flipping audience expectations.
- Key adaptation choices include halving the entrants to deepen character focus and manage production scale.
- The Long Walk debuts with strong reviews despite modest box office, shining as a survival thriller.
Stephen King's dystopian endurance horror-esque tale has finally hit theaters, and Francis Lawrence's adaptation keeps the core premise intact. In a dictatorship, teen boys enter a walk-or-die contest where dropping below pace racks up warnings, and a final warning means execution. Naturally, the last one standing wins. However, there are still a few surprises in this adaptation, including an ending that audiences might not anticipate.
When discussing the film's final act with Entertainment Weekly (spoilers ahead), Lawrence also explains why the movie reorients the final stretch around Garraty and McVries, leading to a different survivor than in King's novel.
The Long Walk Director on the Film's Ending
"You don't really want the guy who's in it for vengeance to win, right? Because that's really not what the story's about," he says. "And I knew that people were really gonna love McVries. What I also loved about it was, just narratively, the idea that we open on a kid in a car and the audience is gonna be programmed to believe, clearly, here's our winner. I love turning that on its head and going, 'Guess what?! He's not the winner.'"
Beyond the winner swap, the adaptation made a conscious effort to trim and refocus. For example, as opposed to the 100 participants in the original story, the film shifts to a more modest 50 entrants, a choice that makes the story more character-forward (and also keeps the production costs more feasible). The cast is stitched around two rising leads and a genre icon. Cooper Hoffman plays Raymond Garraty, and David Jonsson is Peter McVries, with Mark Hamill as the authoritarian Major. Charlie Plummer appears as Gary Barkovitch, Garrett Wareing as Stebbins, Tut Nyuot as Arthur Baker, Ben Wang, and Jordan Gonzalez round out the walker ensemble, and Judy Greer plays Garraty's mother.
Unfortunately, opening weekend landed right where tracking suggested. Lionsgate's release debuted to an estimated $11.5 million (on a production budget of $20 million), placing behind the record anime launch of Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle. However, it's also not exactly a bad number for a smaller-scope survival thriller that's already earning solid reviews from critics and moviegoers.
Overall, the movie seemingly preserves the book's brutal rules, all while giving Lawrence enough room to land a distinctly cinematic ending. Lionsgate's The Long Walk is in theaters now.
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