What happens at the end of The Long Walk? Stephen King loved the ending — Mark Hamill's first reaction was "uh oh"
How The Long Walk ends — Francis Lawrence's 2025 adaptation makes a major change to the finish of Stephen King's 1979 novel, one the author personally signed off on and one that gave Mark Hamill pause when he first read the script. The full film ending, the book comparison, and what everyone involved said about the switch.
Francis Lawrence's The Long Walk reached cinemas on 12 September 2025, forty-six years after Stephen King published the novel under his Richard Bachman pseudonym — and nearly six decades after he actually wrote it, as a University of Maine freshman in 1966–67, before Carrie existed. The film keeps King's premise intact and then rewrites the finish. Spoilers ahead.
The rules of the Walk
- 50 walkers — the film halves the novel's 100 young men.
- 3 miles per hour, minimum — drop below the pace and you're warned.
- Three warnings — then a soldier issues your "ticket": execution on the spot.
- One prize — the last walker standing gets anything he wants, for life.
Cooper Hoffman plays Ray Garraty, David Jonsson is Peter McVries, and Mark Hamill is the Major, the military commander running the contest for a dictatorship-era America. Hamill nearly passed on the part — he's told interviewers he has little appetite for horror or gun-heavy material — before signing on.
How the film ends
The last three walkers are Garraty, McVries, and Stebbins (Garrett Wareing). Stebbins goes down first. That leaves the two friends — and Garraty, who entered the Walk to avenge his father's execution by the Major, talks McVries into continuing, then sits down and accepts his ticket. McVries wins, and for his prize he asks a soldier for a gun. He uses it to shoot the Major, completing Garraty's revenge on his friend's behalf.
What King wrote instead
In the 1979 novel, Garraty is the winner. McVries sits down in the closing stretch and is shot; Garraty, wrecked and hallucinating, sees a dark figure beckoning further up the road and keeps walking. No gun, no revenge, no resolution — the book simply lets him go. Screenwriter JT Mollner (Strange Darling) devised the survivor swap, and Lawrence has said the idea developed once Mollner started working through the script.
The approval that mattered
Lawrence knew the change had to go past King, and told Entertainment Weekly the author liked it because the film stayed true to the book's spirit. Hamill was less sure while reading:
"There's a switch at the end … so big I thought, 'Uh oh!'" he told Entertainment Weekly in September 2025.
He needn't have worried — by his own account, King loved it. The author has spent decades approving and disapproving of adaptations of his work in public, so the endorsement carries weight.
For the record: The Long Walk was the first novel King ever completed. It took 58 years and a Hunger Games director to get it on screen — and the ending that finally arrived isn't quite the one he wrote at 19.
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