Popverse's top stories

• DC has unveiled a major new Wonder Woman villain over two years in the making, co-created by one of James Gunn's top writers
• Simon Kinberg on writing X-Men movies, producing Glenn Powell's The Running Man remake, and co-creating Star Wars Rebels [Popversations]
• Livestream Monster Hunter Wilds, Borderlands 4, Magic: The Gathering x Spider-Man, and more PAX West 2025 panels live

It's been 45 years since Stephen King wrote The Long Walk, the novel whose cinematic adaptation recently opened in theaters across the world. In that time, movies have changed a great deal, particularly in that they've become dominated by PG-13-rated, universally-connected superhero fare. But as King was approached about Long Walk being adapted for a modern audience, he wanted to make sure that that trend didn't affect the weight that his story was meant to have.

King recently sat down with The Times UK about the Mark Hamill-starring, Francis Lawrence-directed Long Walk film, revealing the one condition he had for signing off on the adaptation. 

"If you look at these superhero movies," the Life of Chuck author said, "You’ll see … some supervillain who’s destroying whole city blocks but you never see any blood [...] And man, that’s wrong. It’s almost, like, pornographic … I said, if you’re not going to show it, don’t bother. And so they made a pretty brutal movie."

The "it" that King is talking about isn't the titular Pennywise the Dancing Clown, but rather the real violence against young men that King wrote about in 1979. I case you didn't know, The Long Walk was influenced by the Vietnam War, with King's characters being "the same sort of kids that are pulled into the war machine." In the course of the story, those same types of young men compete in a televised march, with walkers being shot dead if they fall below a speed of 4 MPH.

It's the kind of violence that packs a punch - intimate, tragic, and above all things, visceral. To King's point, it's certainly not the kind of thing you're likely to see in Avengers: Doomsday, no matter how many off-screen deaths are tallied up by the time the movie wraps.

The Long Walk is in theaters now. 

In the immortal words of Danny Elfman, "Life's no fun without a good scare." Join Popverse's weekly explorations of the best opening moments of horror cinema in The Coldest Open, and then check out:

• The best horror movies of all time, according to horror aficionado Greg Silber
• The most underrated horror movies from the past couple years
• All the new and upcoming horror movies for 2025 and beyond

And much gore. Er, more. Much more.