Francis Lawrence’s 2025 movie adaptation of Stephen King’s 1979 novel The Long Walk is fairly faithful to the book — until it suddenly isn’t. Screenwriter JT Mollner (writer-director of the underrated 2023 horror movie Strange Darling) gives some of the primary characters more background and clearer motives. He pares the story’s central death-match competition down from 100 participants to 50. He pushes the propaganda elements behind the Long Walk a little harder, making it clearer why each year, dozens of teenage boys would volunteer to be marched across the country at gunpoint, even knowing they’ll be killed one by one if they falter or try to escape, until only one is left alive.
But he doesn’t change much else. Fans of the book will clearly recognize the characters they already know (by name, personality, narrative function, and the details of their deaths), the story’s specific rise and fall, the mournful short-term friendships these doomed boys form, and the grueling, horrific feeling of inevitability. At least up to a certain point. And at that point, it suddenly becomes important to ask: Which parts of the movie’s ending are real?
[Ed. note: End spoilers ahead for The Long Walk book and movie.]
How Stephen King’s The Long Walk ends
Bear with me here, because for people who only know one version of this story or the either (or neither), we’re going to have to get into some detail to compare them. If you’ve read the book and seen the movie and just want to get into the “What’s real?” part, skip to the final header below.
King’s version of the story brings the competition down to three of the boys. Two of them have forged a connection over the course of four straight days of unbroken walking: Ray Garraty (played in the movie by Cooper Hoffman) and Peter McVries (David Jonsson). The third, identified only as “Stebbins” (Garrett Wareing), holds himself at a distance from the rest of the competitors until the very end of the Walk, but eventually opens up to Garraty and McVries. For McVries, a wise, kind presence who looks after Garraty and saves his life during the Walk, the end comes quickly. He reaches his breaking point and quietly sits down, accepting his execution at the hands of the men overseeing the Walk.
That just leaves Stebbins and Garraty, who keep going in silence for a long, unclear period of time, until Garraty catches up to Stebbins to admit defeat — and Stebbins promptly drops dead. By that time, Garraty is so physically and mentally broken by the ordeal that he can’t even register that he’s won the competition. Hallucinating shadows in the distance, and thinking they’re contestants he still has to beat, he shrugs off the people trying to congratulate him, and just keeps going.
It’s a haunting ending — in a small way, a forerunner to Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games books, and the idea that no one really wins a Battle Royale-style elimination game, even if they survive. But it’s oddly abrupt and anticlimactic after all the buildup, all the mesmerizing dread and horror of the rest of the book. (Even dedicated fans of King’s work often complain about the endings of his novels, to the point where he has a reputation for not sticking his landings.)
The Long Walk is my favorite King book, easily the one I’ve re-read most. But I’ve never felt that attached to the ending, and it certainly doesn’t feel cinematic. When I learned that Lawrence, who directed most of the Hunger Games movies, was finally bringing The Long Walk to the big screen, my biggest question was how he was going to handle the ending.
The Long Walk’s ending, book vs. film
In the movie, the competition again comes down to Garraty, DeVries, and Stebbins. But after Stebbins delivers his speech about who he really is and why he volunteered for the Walk, he says he’s done inspiring people for The Major (Mark Hamill), the enigmatic dictator figure behind the Long Walk, and seemingly behind the dystopian, oppressive society that spawned it. Stebbins turns back toward the soldiers shadowing the competitors, and lets them kill him, leaving DeVries and Garraty alone.
The book’s ending kills DeVries first to separate Garraty from the last person he cared about and connected to on the Walk. DeVries purposefully surrendering to death is both a symbol of the exhaustion and despair the contestants have reached at that point, and the final blow to Garraty’s sanity and sense of self. He’s left in a state of stunned, mechanical apathy, continuing the marathon with a rival he barely knows and doesn’t think he can beat.
The movie kills Stebbins first in order to place Garrity and DeVries as the final survivors, each facing the inevitability that one of them is going to die and leave the other alone. These are pretty different story directions with different flavors: The book is more nihilistic, the movie is more emotional. But it still seems obvious that DeVries is going to give up and let Garraty win the contest.
Garraty, after all, is the clear protagonist of the story. He’s the one most directly wronged by The Major, who personally executed Garraty’s father, with Garraty and his mother watching, for the sedition of reading. Garraty is the one with the plan to strike back: The winner of the annual Long Walk gets to ask for anything, and Garraty plans to ask for a gun, and use it to kill The Major then and there.
Instead, when DeVries tries to give up, stop walking, and let his friend survive the Walk, Garraty hugs him, and pushes him to get going again. Then, once DeVries is in motion, Garraty smiles fondly and drops back behind DeVries, unnoticed, and just stops walking. He’s executed before DeVries even realizes he’s stopped. DeVries is proclaimed the winner. After mourning over Garraty’s bloody corpse, he follows through with Garraty’s plan, requisitioning a rifle from one of the soldiers charged with executing the Long Walkers, then shooting the Major dead. Then he turns to walk away, as if he, like Garraty in the book, is just going to continue the Long Walk alone — albeit with far more intentionality and seeming sanity.
That ending is certainly more cinematic — it’s a curveball both for an audience familiar with the book, and for those who aren’t, and who think they see exactly what’s coming when DeVries tries to give up and let Garraty win. And it’s a little less grim and nihilistic. Garraty is dead, but his father and all the other boys dead in the Long Walk have been avenged, and the audience can at least imagine a future where The Major’s death launches some kind of seismic change for the better in this dark, impoverished, bitter world.
But is what we see on screen actually what happens at all?
What’s actually real in the ending of The Long Walk?
I don’t think there’s any doubt that Garraty’s death, or DeVries’ grief and his request for a rifle, all play out exactly as we see them on screen. But once DeVries gets the rifle and points it at The Major, reality starts to get increasingly wonky. The background blurs away. The sound of the vast crowd that assembled to watch the end of the Walk fades out into a hollow emptiness around them — not the sound of a crowd holding its breath, but the absence of ambient sound. The space around DeVries and The Major starts to become less real.
You could certainly read this as subjective sound, as an expression of the focus DeVries is feeling in this moment, when everything else drops away, including Garraty’s body. But DeVries doesn’t have the kind of personal connection to The Major that Garraty or Stebbins had, the kind of connection that would make this moment play like a vindication. It doesn’t feel like the world has fallen away around them, leaving them alone together. It feels like DeVries is in an imaginary space by himself.
And then he holds the rifle on The Major far longer than the element of surprise would allow — The Major has ordered the soldiers around him to stand down, but it’s still hard to imagine no one would take the shot to save his life. Once DeVries kills The Major, there’s even less reason to hold back. The Major’s orders aren’t relevant anymore, and neither is his safety.
In that moment, there’s a way Lawrence might have framed this all to tell us something major has changed not just for DeVries, but for the country. But there are no reaction shots from the soldiers deciding not to kill the teenager who’s just killed their leader. There’s no footage of the crowd that would tell us they’re about to lift DeVries up on their shoulders in celebration, or tear him apart. It seems remotely possible that in the moment where he’s holding The Major at gunpoint, everyone would wait and watch and keep still, but if this was all really happening, it’s almost certain that one of The Major’s ruthless trained killers, who have been gunning down teenage boys at point-blank range for days, would kill DeVries — if not for revenge, then simply because of the adrenaline of the situation.
No one shoots him. No one moves into frame to arrest him. We never find out how anyone else responds to The Major’s death. He’s left alone in a soft-focused, shadowed space where the only solid thing is the road stretching ahead of him. And that makes the ending feel incredibly unreal — as unreal as the phantoms Garraty chases down the road at the end of the novel.
My read on the entire scene is that DeVries does get killed, possibly immediately after shooting The Major. The liminal half-space he winds up in after that — a place where the bystanders and soldiers have just plain ceased to exist — is whatever comes next. A more sentimental director would show him reuniting with Garraty in that fuzzy, soft-focus space. (In the book, after DeVries is killed, Stebbins briefly tries to talk Garraty into giving up too: “If there are such things as souls, his is still close. You could catch up.”) A more cynical one might show the boys’ bodies lying side by side on the road. A more uplifting one might show the aftermath of either The Major’s death, or DeVries’ shooting, with the people rioting against either losing their supposedly beloved leader, or losing the Long Walk winner, who’s been upheld throughout the film as a symbol of the nation.
Instead, Lawrence and Mollner give us ambiguity. There’s nothing to latch onto in the final shot to tell us what the reality is, or what the future looks like for DeVries or this country. There are no answers. It’s a direct parallel for the end of King’s book, with a winner who doesn’t feel like he’s won, and a symbolic road ahead that you can read however you want.
Maybe we’re meant to take it all literally, and Lawrence and Mollner are just suggesting that, for DeVries, the fate of the country and the response of the crowd around him don’t matter anymore. But their lack of emotional impact on him wouldn’t in any way explain their lack of physical presence, their ability to touch him, the way they all seem to just fade into mist. Maybe this is a classic lady or the tiger audience-choice ending, and we’re each meant to see what we want in it.
But for me at least, DeVries being allowed to kill The Major and then walk away doesn’t feel possible, and doesn’t feel plausible — not without some sense of why that might happen. Nothing in the movie up to that moment sets up the idea that The Major’s most devoted killers wouldn’t respond in some way to his death, or that a crowd primed to shriek with excitement and enthusiasm over the graphic murder of teenage boys would stand by silently when their world changes in front of them. I don’t think what we’re seeing is real. Whether that’s a satisfying landing for this story, well, that’s even more up to individual interpretation than the facts of the ending itself.
