This article contains The Long Walk spoilers.

The Long Walk was the first novel Stephen King ever completed. It was not the first book published. That distinction belongs to Carrie, which originally appeared as a paperback in 1974. But nearly a decade before that, King was writing The Long Walk as a freshman at the University of Maine.

The youthfulness, and anger, of the literary work’s reaction to the then raging Vietnam War is still immediate to any modern eye. A story where virtually every named character is an adolescent boy who will soon be dead, including our point-of-view character Ray Garraty, is a simple and brutally efficient parable. It would also predict decades in advance the concept of “reality” TV competition, with viewers at home picking their favorite Walkers and Vegas bookies laying odds on them. It was a gateway to the now booming subgenre of fiction that includes Battle Royale, Squid Game, and The Hunger Games among its ranks.

Intriguingly it is the director most associated with the Hunger Games adaptations who also now is tackling King’s paterfamilias young adult dystopian fiction, with Francis Lawrence helming a screenplay by J.T. Mollner. Both artists honor the abject humanism of King’s work and capture the surreal horror of this maddening setup, but they also make bold changes to the source material, including entirely changing the ending. There are likely reasons for each change that we can only speculate on, as well as opportunities to note what the differences might imply. Below we unpack the biggest points of comparison and contrast.

Superficial Changes Made for Expediency

When adapting a novel, even one as succinct as The Long Walk, concessions to the new medium and the expectations that come with them will naturally lead to omissions, a condensing of events, and the compositing of characters. We do not wish to exhaustively list every such change made to the material, but we can highlight some of the more noticeable ones right here.

Stephen King, for one, has already acknowledged a shift that his constant readers picked up on in the trailers: in the novel, the Walkers are required to keep at a speed of four miles-per-hour or faster, otherwise they get a warning. In the movie, it was changed to a more reasonable pace of at least three miles-per-hour. According to producer Roy Lee, King asked to make the change for the film, stating, “There’s no way you could walk four miles an hour for that long.”

That seems a prudent realization, and one we imagine the filmmakers were already eying since having the characters rushing at a brisk walk the whole movie would make it more difficult to maintain the fraternal, and eventually wistful, character conversations and tone.

Similar changes include that in the novel there are 100 walkers chosen allegedly at random by a lottery—albeit then with a much more extensive screening and interview process which measures the candidates by mysterious standards. In the movie, it’s 50. Furthermore, one child represents each state in the U.S., whereas it was presented as a fluke that Garraty was a local boy from the state of Maine where the walk begins. This obviously makes it easier to have fewer characters—and more affordable to have fewer extras—in a narrative like this. It is likely for the same reason that while the Walkers pass crowds in nearly every small town they go through in the book, including Freeport, Maine where Garraty sees his mother, in the movie it is said that no crowds are allowed.

In the same vein, several of the tertiary Walkers are blended together. So while Ben Wang’s Mark Colson is both the braggart and unlikely young married man among the film’s contestants, the book’s Mark has no wife. However, a character named Scramm does—a bit of a two-dimensional hillbilly type with missing teeth from the Midwest. Scramm is also the most outwardly athletic boy, and the oddsmakers in Vegas think he’s the one to beat until he gets a cold. In the film, the more stealthily imposing Stebbins (Garrett Wareing) is both the obvious frontrunner and the one felled by an unlucky illness.

There are a number of other changes likely made for either time, budget, or medium constraints. There’s simply less space in a two hour movie for beats like the bit early in the book of Olson psyching out the competition, or a subplot about one of the boys’ mother (Percy, who does not appear in the movie) trying to call out to her son from various vantages on the side of the road until the government arrests her. But such changes are the nature of the beast.

Garraty and McVries’ Motivations

Major shifts that are more than utilitarian begin with the backstories and motivations which drive our two main characters, Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) and Peter McVries (David Jonsson).

In the text, Garraty is like a lot of other kids: he cannot really articulate why he signed up for the Long Walk lottery. Like Hoffman’s Garraty, he has vivid memories of his father being dragged out of their family home for expressing anti-government sentiments against a fascist autocracy. However, Garraty neither sees his father executed, nor is it inexplicably at the hands of the Major (Mark Hamill in the movie), a national figure who is unlikely to be doing the grunt work of oppression in small town New England.

Garraty represents the metaphor of youth in America, and what King likely saw as a naivety and inability to grasp one’s own mortality until it is too late. Ray wants the prize of untold riches, and he likely in some way is reacting subconsciously to the anger of his father being gone. His father took him as a child once to watch the Long Walk in Freeport (where they did not live in the book) with the intention of teaching his son the horror of the Long Walk and their government. Yet after his father’s politics leads to his absence, Garraty finds himself rebelling against his memory and joining the Long Walk. He does not seem fully aware of this spiteful self-destruction, but he is lashing out at his parents by signing up for the system of the broken world they bequeathed him.

In the movie, he has a much more clean, Hunger Games-esque mission of tearing down the system by inspiring resistance via the planned assassination of the Major. It’s an easier motivation to cinematically convey (REVENGE!), but it also has profound implications on the ending, which we will get to in a moment.

McVries’ transformed motivations are more striking though. In the motion picture, the second lead is played with dazzling charisma and affability by Jonsson as not just a good friend, but a kind of ring leader to the Four Musketeer team he builds up. We eventually learn that this aura is something he carefully cultivated over a lifetime of uncertainty and loneliness. It turns out Jonsson’s McVries is an orphan who got his scar by being beaten by a stranger in the streets. He has since learned how to ingratiate himself with other kids, building fast and profound connections, and spending his teenage years sleeping on couches and in basements.

He doesn’t quite articulate it, but it would seem that like Art Baker, McVries joined the Long Walk for the camaraderie and sense of belonging it provides. He feels like he has found a real brother in Garraty… and perhaps more.

But right down to the scar, McVries’ past and future signal something darker in the text. That’s because the literary McVries did not get the scar while fighting a bully. He gained it after a fight with his girlfriend turned violent. Yes, in the book McVries had a girlfriend. He eventually admits they left home in high school to live in the city together as young people (which would have been more taboo in the 1960s than today). However, after she gets a promotion at her work and sees a better future than Peter can afford in his factory work, McVries’ resentments turn physical and in a particularly disturbing admission, it’s suggested he might have sexually assaulted her. It’s framing in the book is deliberately vague, with McVries telling Garraty that wasn’t his intention, but when he reached out to kiss her, she cut him to protect herself. But this is his version of events and there is a self-loathing in Pete that gives pause (as do the social understandings of consent in the 1960s).

McVries ultimately admits that since that day he’s had a death wish, just as he suspects every boy on the Long Walk secretly does in one way or another.

Sex and Death

It is perhaps prudent at this point to acknowledge that King’s Long Walk delves at least superficially into the fixation of a lot of teenage boys: sex for some an love for others. While McVries develops a strong sense of self-loathing in the book after what he did to a girlfriend he knew was slipping away, it is Garraty’s girlfriend more than his mother who inspires him to keep walking.

In the source material, Garraty never broke up with high school sweetheart Jan. It came close as he recalls how she pleaded with him to back out of the Long Walk after she discovered he “won” the lottery, but she stands by him. And it is Jan who Garraty’s internal monologue fixates on and deifies before the end. Like a soldier at war writing to a fiancée he barely knows, Ray rapidly goes from viewing Jan as a person to an ideal that gives him a reason to keep walking. In the huge crowd outside Freeport, it’s Jan and his mother who are waiting for him, and to Ray’s later regret, he completely ignores his mother in favor of holding Jan with tears in his eyes until McVries saves him from getting a ticket in front of them.

The irony of this is that only two days earlier, Garraty was unfaithful to Jan when he allowed a fangirl cheering “Maine’s Own” on the side of the road to make out with him. He even risks getting a ticket as his lust and erection lead to him lingering long enough to feel her up. Later, another boy in the walk ends up dying after being unable to leave a thrill-seeker who similarly tempts him at the side of the road. Meanwhile other Walkers discuss girlfriends who tried to dissuade them from the competition; and in Scramm’s case, he chose to do this suicidal thing because he had a wife and kid on the way back home. He admits he is too poor for college, but he plans to make sure his child could go to any school she wants.

Excising any trace of these story elements is curious. On the one hand, it again streamlines the narrative to a crisp descent into darkness. On the other, it ignores one of the core aspects of life: love (even if it is almost entirely aspirational for adolescent boys). There is also King’s interest in exploring the uncomfortable paradoxes of adolescent life, high ideals and physical repression. It may also echo the experience of guys he knew who went to ‘Nam.

I personally wonder if removing these elements is a commercial one since (social media tells us) romance, and sensuality in particular, have become controversial with younger moviegoers. Then again, Lawrence’s own Hunger Games franchise would seem to dispute this emerging conventional wisdom in Hollywood. More likely, I suspect the choice was made to remove what might become more unsavory aspects of the Walkers (McVries assaulting his girlfriend) as well as the crowds who watch them (it’s heavily implied that the kid who died in a state of lust was lured to his death by a girl who wanted to see a ticket punched).

Intriguingly it also narrows the focus entirely to the camaraderie of the Walkers, and even leaves open an interpretation that McVries and Garraty could be more than brothers. When Garraty asks McVries if he has a girlfriend, there is a look of longing on his face as he pauses to answer no. This could suggest the loneliness of a boy who doesn’t have a home; or it could be read as someone who sees in Garraty a possible kindred spirit. 

Friendship Over Hate?

All of these elements seem to circle the central thesis of the tale: why did they sign up for this? In both versions of the story, we are told that the Long Walk is voluntary, although in the film, we are given the added texture that no boy on the road knows of a friend or classmate who didn’t also enter the lottery.

On the page, it’s not quite so simple. While we are told there are hundreds of thousands of applicants in any given year, it is not millions. It is indeed a big deal that Garraty was a local boy who entered and won the lottery. The mayor of his tiny hometown hosts a dinner at the nicest restaurant around where Ray and his mother are the guests of honor. This occurs despite his mother, his mother’s boyfriend, and Jan all begging Ray to drop out.

That is because plenty of boys do not enter the lottery, and plenty more back out after winning. One of the characters cut in the film even reveals he entered the lottery as a joke, making fun of the Major in his application’s essay portion. He only bothered applying because the movie he wanted to see that night at the cinema was sold out. For King, the driving question is always why?

One reading of the book would suggest it derives from mirroring the world around King in 1966. At that time, conscription at the local draft board was mandatory for American males above the age of 18, but there were plenty of volunteers as well. The why of it seemed to haunt King, who blamed the absent-minded community of flag-wavers who urged young men to throw their lives away (at least that’s how it’s framed in the book). For no discernible reason, kids were dying in the jungles and on the six o’clock news every night, and everyone acted like it was the most natural thing in the world. Why Garraty, angry at an absent father and his doting mother, or McVries, who was angry at himself, his lot in life, and his romantic/sexual frustration, signed up when others didn’t becomes the point.

In the movie, that decision is almost made for them. Everyone does it. No one backs out, even though the book’s McVries was actually an alternate who only found out about 12 hours before the Walk he “won” the chance to join after another kid changed his mind. In this way, Mollner and Lawrence would seem to be updating the theme to be not so much about a war as perhaps the American system itself. These boys, like any good consumer, are promised the chance to one day be rich and successful… even though for the system to work, it will mean most of them can never be those things.

So like any child who one day dreams of being president or an influencer, or an NBA star, or NBA owner, the Walkers all buy into the system without much thinking about the downsides of it until it’s facing them like a loaded gun. But since there is almost no logical escape from the system, the film is less interested in blaming anyone but the powers-at-be. In the book, Garraty and the reader come to despise the sycophants and gawkers who cheer them on but thirst to see red.

Yet when Cooper’s Garraty begins thinking that way onscreen, McVries tells him to gain some perspective. Everyone on the sides of those roads, he claims, are simply families trying to get by. They are driven by love, not hate. For most of its running time, the film would seem to echo those sentiments, with McVries being the voice of reason as he tells Garraty to go back to his loving mother if he wins the Walk. One might even say a storyteller in 2025 has a little more sympathy for Americans living under an increasingly authoritarian and autocratic state. Whereas King saw collaborators and tools, Lawrence and Mollner see victims or folks trying to endure a world sliding into madness. This is a story about love of thy neighbor and fellow man triumphing over hate.

… At least that seemed to be the point until we get to the ending.

… About That Ending

Which brings us back to the biggest changes from King’s book: how it ends. The final movements of the page are actually quite ambiguous and haunting. Rather than Garraty and McVries, the final two Walkers of the novel are Garraty and Stebbins. McVries just eventually sits down and meets as peaceful an end as a gun allows. Meanwhile Stebbins doesn’t so much choose to embrace his fate, as realizing that despite his confidence he is flesh and blood. He just eventually collapses dead of exhaustion and fatigue, leaving Garraty the default winner.

But when the Major comes to congratulate Garraty on his valor and victory, Garraty doesn’t seem to notice the old man. Instead he looks past him at a dark mysterious figure.

“Garraty stepped aside. He was not alone. The dark figure was back, up ahead, not far, beckoning. He knew that figure. If he could get a little closer, he could make out the features. Which one hadn’t he walked down? Was it Barkovitch? Collie Parker? Percy What’hisname? Who was it? …  A hand on his shoulder. Garraty shook it off impatiently. The dark figure beckoned, beckoned in the rain, beckoned for him to come and walk, to come and play the game. And it was time to get started. There was still so far to walk.”

Deliberately opaque, King’s ending leaves much to the imagination. What was it that Garraty thought he saw, and what would happen to him? The short version, in this writer’s opinion, is that it was the shadow of death and also his future. No one wins the game. Even if you are the last survivor, the trauma and horror of what you endured in this mad world will never leave you. The walk will never end, and for however many days or years Garraty has left, and whatever riches that fill them, he’ll never be able to shake or leave the soul-crushing horror of what he experienced and had to do to survive.

It’s bleak and probably too ephemeral for a commercial studio entertainment.

So in the film, we get a major reversal both from the book and general audience expectation. Rather than Garraty being the winner, he sacrifices himself to save McVries. Garraty was obsessed with avenging his father, and maybe igniting a revolution. McVries only wanted to live and use a gained fortune to maybe find love. But he also didn’t expect to win.

So the movie’s Garraty dies for McVries… and perhaps then so does McVries for Garraty.

In the last moments of the picture, the young man who preached love to Garraty arguably gives in to hate. He fulfills Garraty’s original wish  by asking for a carbine and using it to assassinate the Major on the spot. He then walks off into the rain and darkness to a mysterious fate.

In some ways, it is the most crowdpleasing ending. McVries shoots the bad guy in Ray’s name. But it’s also just as bleak as the book, for surely Pete will be executed within moments after the film cuts to black, right? It maintains a level of mystery similar to the book while giving it a more action-forward turn.

In actuality, this is probably a more subversive ending. While the novel’s poetic end has sophistication, and matches the downbeat zeitgeist of the incoming 1970s, it’s ultimately pessimistic. There is no hope in this world. Live or die, you always lose. It’s doubtful the movie’s McVries will live much longer than his literary counterpart, but he still enacted some type of radical subversive change by murdering a man who represents oppression to the whole country on live television… and it wasn’t done out of hate. He did it as an act of love for Ray.

The ending would seem to offer flickers of the same revolutionary desire to overthrow an oppressive system one might see in The Hunger Games or V for Vendetta. And in our current political climate where folks feel evermore angry and helpless, McVries and the movie’s about-face over love being enough to endure a fascist state seems startlingly transgressive. There are miles still to go, but it’s a first step.

The Long Walk is in theaters now.