'The Long Walk' Ending and Book Changes Explained

Header Image Source: Lionsgate

There are spoilers for the book and the movie. Obviously.

I read Stephen King’s The Long Walk about a week before watching the movie, and it’s interesting because they’re very similar, yet neither detracts from the other. They’re both great in the same ways but also different. A novel can capture things a movie can’t, and vice versa, but Francis Lawrence probably delivered about as strong an adaptation as possible — one that makes the central characters more likable and the ending slightly less bleak.

What Francis Lawrence does not do, working from a JT Mollner screenplay, is change the premise. The movie opens with some exposition explaining what the Long Walk is — material that in the novel emerge

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