The Long Walk’s Brutal New Ending, Explained

Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of The Long Walk .

Few authors have more thoroughly prepared us for our dystopian future than Stephen King. Over the course of 60-plus novels and a couple hundred short stories, he’s depicted everything from a civilization-upending pandemic in The Stand to a real-estate huckster who uses his outsider status to become a political demagogue in The Dead Zone . In two separate novels written under his pen name of Richard Bachman, he crafted tales of an economically ravaged U.S. where a totalitarian regime distracts the populace with televised bloodsport. The 2025-set The Running Man will see its second film adaptation released in November, while The Long Walk is just now hitting theaters for the first time after spending decades in developmen