As The Long Walk<\/a> makes the trek from the page to the screen, Stephen King<\/a> recently revealed the one condition he had for adapting his 1979 novel.<\/p>\n The author explained that the characters in the book are \u201cthe same sort of kids that are pulled into the war machine\u201d of Vietnam, noting that he required screenwriter JT Mollner<\/a> and director Francis Lawrence<\/a> to show teens getting shot in their film.<\/p>\n More from Deadline<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cIf you look at these superhero movies, you\u2019ll see \u2026 some supervillain who\u2019s destroying whole city blocks but you never see any blood. And man, that\u2019s wrong. It\u2019s almost, like, pornographic,\u201d King told The Times of London<\/a>. \u201cI said, if you\u2019re not going to show it, don\u2019t bother. And so they made a pretty brutal movie.\u201d<\/p>\n In The Long Walk, premiering Sept. 12 in theaters, a group of 100 young men enter an annual walking contest in dystopian America, in which the losers are executed and only one person survives.<\/p>\n As Lionsgate<\/a> screened the first 20 minutes of the movie at Comic-Con, Mollner said he \u201cwanted to keep the DNA<\/a> and themes that Stephen King baked into his original novel.\u201d<\/p>\n Stephen King poses on a red carpet.<\/p>\n \u201cEven though he was writing about specific things at the time, I feel that relevance is generational and wanted to make sure we had that. The beauty, love and the story of friendship along with the brutality of hopelessness and terror,\u201d added Mollner. \u201cWe wanted to go all the way. I knew that Stephen King wanted us to go all the way. I knew Lionsgate wanted us to go all the way. If this book got into the wrong hands, studio or filmmakers. It could\u2019ve been neutered. So, I\u2019m very grateful we were able to keep the teeth that the book has.\u201d<\/p>\n Best of Deadline<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Deadline’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source sg.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As The Long Walk makes the trek from the page to the screen, Stephen King recently revealed the one condition he had for adapting his 1979 novel. The author explained that the characters in the book are \u201cthe same sort of kids that are pulled into the war machine\u201d of Vietnam, noting that he required […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1992184,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[360185,52282],"class_list":["post-1992183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-francis-lawrence","tag-stephen-king"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Stephen-King-Demanded-\u2018The-Long-Walk-Show-Teens-Getting-Shot.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1992183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1992183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1992183\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1992184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1992183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1992183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1992183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/span><\/div>\n