Warning! This post contains major spoilers for the endings of the book and the movie titled, The Long Walk.
The movie The Long Walk, directed by Hunger Games alum Francis Lawrence and based on the 1979 Stephen King (Richard Bachman, technically) novel of the same name, is brutal, just like its source material. The film, however, has an ending that is markedly different from the book. And in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Lawrence explains why scriptwriter J.T. Mollner made those changes, and why King ultimately signed off on them.
Another warning for spoilers! Stop reading if you don’t want to know the endings of the book or movie!
Okay. So in the book and the film, three boys are left at the end, still walking more than three miles an hour and still alive. (The conceit of the march is that the final winner is the young person who is left standing, with anyone who goes slower than three miles per hour summarily executed.) Those three are Garraty, Stebbins, and McVries.
“J.T. had a new idea on backstory, which was that the Major had done something to [Garraty’s] family,” Lawrence told EW, “and he had these different motives for going into the Long Walk, which I really liked.” That backstory sees the Major shooting Garraty’s father.
At the end of the book, McVries decides to sit down and accept his fate, leaving Stebbins and Garraty. Stebbins suddenly drops down dead and Garraty stumbles off toward a dark figure that presumably only he can see.
In the film, it’s Stebbins (Garrett Wareing) who goes down first. Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) convinces McVries (David Jonsson) to continue, and then sacrifices himself by sitting down. McVries, now the winner, asks for a gun, shoots the Major, and then walks alone down the road.
“This idea that McVries was gonna sacrifice himself because he loves Garraty so much, and that Garraty ends up sacrificing himself because he believes McVries is the one that’s worthy of winning, that kind of shared experience, I thought, was really emotional,” Lawrence said.
He added, “You don’t really want the guy who’s in it for vengeance to win, right? Because that’s really not what the story’s about. And I knew that people were really gonna love McVries. What I also loved about it was, just narratively, the idea that we open on a kid in a car and the audience is gonna be programmed to believe, clearly, here’s our winner. I love turning that on its head and going, ‘Guess what?! He’s not the winner.’”
Lawrence was reportedly nervous to see if King would sign off on the change, but the author, who was an executive producer on the project, did. “He really liked the ending, I think, because we stayed true to its spirit,” Lawrence said. “I think he was willing to go for it.”
The Long Walk is now playing in theaters.
