Welcome to one of the most exciting weeks of the year for Hollywood! CinemaCon – the annual convention for movie theater owners held in Las Vegas – has been rolling since Monday, and the event has been a particular treat for me as a Stephen King fan given the extremely packed calendar of adaptations in 2025. Obviously we haven’t heard any updates about the small screen projects IT: Welcome To Derry and The Institute, but I have gotten to witness some very exciting previews for the big screen projects, and I’m excited to discuss them in this week’s The King Beat.
So what has been going on at CinemaCon? I’ll start by highlighting the very special preview of The Long Walk that was debuted by Lionsgate, but that’s only the start of the fun in this week’s column. Let’s dig in!
The Long Walk Trailer Makes The Movie Look Just Like The Book, And It Dropped My Jaw
It is not a mystery to me why Stephen King’s The Long Walk hasn’t been adapted – and I think anyone who has read it probably feels the same way. Part of the issue is the construction of the narrative, as just about the entire book simply follows a collection of characters walking on a road, but more significantly, the story is Brutal (and that capital “B” is not a typo). One would think that any attempt at turning it into a movie would mean a studio/filmmakers trying to soften the material and make it more palatable for mass audiences.
I’ll admit that this has lingered as a concern in the back of my mind as I have followed the development of director Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk over the last year, but thanks to what I got to see from the movie at CinemaCon this week, any and all concerns are now gone. Instead, I’m now girding myself for the film to be one of the most tense and emotionally fraught pieces of cinema that arrives on the big screen in 2025.
The first trailer for The Long Walk was debuted during the Lionsgate presentation at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace on Tuesday morning, and the exhibitors in the crowd were treated to some harrowing footage. The preview starts off with a light tone – including soft acoustic guitar music, beautiful shots of characters peacefully walking along a country road, and a scene where Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) and the other boys in the titular competition introduce themselves. There is smiling and strolling, talk of inspiring the country, and excitement about winning the prize money. But then things take a dark turn. When one of the teens gets a severe cramp, he can’t keep up with the others. He lags behind. Heard through a bullhorn, he receives a trio of warnings. And when he goes down and can’t get back up, soldiers come out, aim their rifles at him, and shoot him dead. We see Ray, who looks horrified, but he can’t look back.
Played by Mark Hamill, The Major explains both the basic rules of the contest – you maintain a constant three-mile-per-hour walking speed or “you get your ticket” – and notes the dangers that the young contestants will face: they will keeping walking and pushing themselves as hard as they can, but sometimes hearts and minds will break. As the word “Warning” is constantly repeated on the soundtrack and intense music plays, there is footage of attempted escape, bloody feet trudging, exhausted faces, and a kid having a seizure. The Major boldly pronounces that, “There is one winner and no finish line.”
I love that the footage was able to show both the camaraderie between the characters and the intensity of the competition, and I could practically feel everyone in the audience at The Colosseum holding their breath as the tension palpably rose. If The Long Walk ends up being as good as the trailer suggests, it may end up being one of the most gut-wrenching Stephen King adaptations ever.
And we won’t have to wait long to see it! On the schedule of upcoming Stephen King adaptations, the film has a spot on the 2025 movie release calendar between Mike Flanagan’s The Life Of Chuck (arriving this June) and Edgar Wright’s The Running Man (set for November). With a cast including David Jonsson, Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot, Charlie Plummer, Ben Wang, Roman Griffin Davis, Jordan Gonzalez, Josh Hamilton, and Judy Greer in addition to the aforementioned Cooper Hoffman and Mark Hamill, The Long Walk will be arriving in theaters everywhere on September 12.
Get Ready For Some Updates About The Running Man Later Today At CinemaCon
While the focus of The King Beat is typically on Stephen King-related news/updates that have developed in the past seven days, I want to use this space in this week’s column to give you a heads up about the very near future!
Lionsgate hosted its CinemaCon presentation this past Tuesday, but today, Thursday April 3, will see representatives from Paramount Pictures hit the stage of The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, and it’s guaranteed that we will be getting a special early look at Edgar Wright’s The Running Man.
At the time that I am writing this, I can’t say with any kind of certainty what we are going to be seeing from the new adaptation of the Stephen King thriller, but it has been confirmed that Edgar Wright and stars Glen Powell, Josh Brolin and Colman Domingo are all in Las Vegas. We can assume that they will be all on hand to preview their work on the project, and given that the film has completed production, it feels fair to assume that we are going to be getting at least some footage – be it just a trailer or perhaps a look at a full sequence from the movie.
Like The Long Walk, The Running Man was originally published with Stephen King’s pen name, Richard Bachman, and it’s arguably one of his most underappreciated books. The story is about a man named Ben Richards living in a dystopian United States who is driven to the point of desperation so that he can purchase medicine for his sick child. He agrees to appear on one of the country’s dangerous state-sponsored game shows, and he gets selected for the extremely popular program The Running Man. As a contestant, he essentially becomes the most wanted man in America, and the longer he can survive while having a team of trained killers hunting him around the country, the more money he will earn for his family.
The new film will be a much more faithful adaptation of the source material than the 1987 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (one of the least faithful Stephen King adaptations of all time), and in addition to the actors mentioned above, the stacked ensemble cast also includes Katy O’Brian, Daniel Ezra, Karl Glusman, Lee Pace, Michael Cera, William H. Macy, David Zayas, Sean Hayes, and more.
Because The Running Man won’t be arriving in theaters until November 7, it’s unlikely that whatever footage is shown at CinemaCon will be making its way online, but be on the lookout for my coverage of the Paramount Presentation here on CinemaBlend later this afternoon!
A Limited Edition Dead Zone Steelbook Is Available For Pre-Order, And It’s A Thing Of Beauty
Scream Factory has been a good friend to Stephen King fans who are also physical media collectors (like myself). The boutique home video company has released many great 4K UHDs and Blu-rays over the years, from classics like Carrie, Firestarter and Creepshow to more niche titles like Sleepwalkers, Tales From The Darkside: The Movie and Thinner. The company does some great restorations, and the Collector’s Editions have excellent special features, but they also sometimes do some extra great work when it comes to packaging, and the most recent example is the brand new Steelbook for David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone that is now available for pre-order.
A 4K UHD of The Dead Zone was previously released by Scream Factory in December 2023, and the original printing featured both a slipcover with the classic poster and reversible interior artwork, but collectors can now upgrade their copies with the Amazon exclusive Steelbook. I’ll be totally frank and note that it isn’t cheap (it’s currently listed at $44.98), but it looks fantastic – sporting original cover art not on the original version.
You can take a look at it below (unfortunately, there is no image currently available of what the interior art looks like):
Based on the 1979 Stephen King novel of the same name, The Dead Zone stars Christopher Walken as Johnny Smith – a beloved English teacher who falls into a multi-year coma following a devastating car crash. When he finally awakens, he discovers that he suddenly has an incredible new ability: if he touches a person or a meaningful object, he experiences intense psychic visions. More than 40 years after its original release, the film remains regarded as one of the best King adaptations of all time, and if you don’t already have a copy of it in your physical media collection, now is the time to add the best version of the movie that has ever been available on home video.
That wraps up this edition of The King Beat, but because every week is always full of new developments in the world of Stephen King, I’ll be back here on CinemaBlend next Thursday with a fresh column full of brand new headlines. In the meantime, you can learn about the long history of King adaptations via my series Adapting Stephen King.
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