If influencers want to see The Long Walk, they're gonna have to walk

The human impulse to watch people subject themselves to horrifying murder games and think, "Aw, I could handle that" continues apace.

By William Hughes | August 29, 2025 | 5:22pm

Roman Griffin Davis in The Long Walk, Photo: Lionsgate/Murray Close

Film News The Long Walk

If influencers want to see The Long Walk, they're gonna have to walk

Having once again ignored the advice/jokes of our former The Onion and Clickhole colleague Alex Blechman to not create the gosh darn Torment Nexus, the marketing minds promoting upcoming Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk have gone ahead and created a Long Walk of their very own. Per Gizmodo, Lionsgate’s PR team has cooked up what is kind of a clever stunt to promote the film, even if hews a little too closely to the “I watched Squid Game and now I want to be in a Squid Game” mindset that marketing companies have been cultivating in audiences in recent years: An influencers-only screening of the film in which viewers have to maintain a walking pace of three miles an hour on treadmills, or else they’ll be escorted out of the theater.

As viewers of the film’s trailer—or readers of King’s original book, which he published under his Richard “These Are The Real Fucked Up Ones” Bachman pen name back in 1979—know, the influencers in question will be getting off relatively lightly. Participants in the actual Long Walk, which stars Cooper Hoffman as one of the probably-doomed walkers, aren’t just asked to cut their streams short when they dip below that three mile-per-hour limit: They get a bullet in the head. (By the way, this is the first time we’ve noticed that the movie is dropping the book’s original four m.p.h. limit down a notch; young people these days, we tell you what.)

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The film is, not entirely surprisingly, being directed by Hunger Games mainstay Francis Lawrence, who’s made a very comfortable career for himself by filming teenagers getting subjected to various sadistic murder games for the last decade. (To be fair to Francis, though, we’re fairly sure this is the first time Lionsgate has ever tried to export one of his movies out into the real world.) The special screening will take place on Saturday, August 30, in Los Angeles; participants will presumably end up feeling grateful that Francis’ movie is only 108 minutes long, since the actual Long Walkers have to go until they’re the last man standing. For those of us managing our inherent death wishes in slightly less obvious ways, meanwhile, The Long Walk opens in theaters on September 12.