Stephen King has one rule for the The Long Walk film adaptation, and that is not to sanitize the violence like Marvel and DC often do. While speaking to The Times, the legendary author criticized Hollywood’s approach towards superhero franchises:
If you look at these superhero movies, 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, p*rnographic… I said [for The Long Walk], if you’re not going to show it, don’t bother. And so they made a pretty brutal movie
The Long Walk is directed by Francis Lawrence and stays true to King’s chilling dystopian tale. The story revolves around teenage boys who keep walking in a competition, where they’re required to pace or face death. With Cooper Hoffman in the lead and Mark Hamill as the antagonist, the cast looks quite promising.
And King’s commitment to authenticity might just be what the movie needs. So, let’s look at why he condemned the violence aspect of superhero features, and why The Long Walk
Why Stephen King Called Out Marvel and DC’s Clean-cut Violence?
Marvel and DC have built billion-dollar cinematic empires of spectacle and destruction, where people die like flies. But Stephen King points out how these movies rarely show the aftermath of all that chaos. When a whole city collapses in The Avengers or Man of Steel, we hardly see any blood, injuries, or human suffering.
His frustration lies in how the violence is being glossed over with flashy CGI and pop soundtracks, making us quite numb to it. We see characters rack up kill counts in murder montages, but there’s a lack of blood and consequence, and a tragedy is turned into entertainment instead.
These movies are essentially designed for kids, but King calls their approach “p*nographic” because viewers are never shown the pain and reality, and they enjoy a gruesome scene almost guilt-free. For a writer of his stature, who’s built a career on forcing his readers to confront brutality and fear head-on, making violence weightless is simply unacceptable!
The Long Walk Needs Stephen King’s Approach Towards Brutality
The Long Walk is about teenage boys competing in a government-sanctioned endurance contest where stopping means death, so there’s no sugarcoating in the novel. It’s precisely about how horrifying violence is turned into entertainment, so it would be counterintuitive not to show the aftermath of it all and betray the story’s themes.
In a world where people’s suffering is turned into cartoonish moments, The Long Walk will not hesitate to show the true cost of brutalism. That’s precisely what will set the adaptation apart from the countless dystopian and superhero films flooding the market in today’s time.
So, what do you think? Is Marvel and DC’s approach wrong, and does The Long Walk really need to keep all the violence unfiltered? Let us know in the comments!
The Long Walk will release in theaters on September 12, 2025 (USA).
