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Superficial Changes Made for Expediency
When adapting a novel, even one as succinct as The Long Walk, concessions to the new medium and the expectations that come with them will naturally lead to omissions, a condensing of events, and the compositing of characters. We do not wish to exhaustively list every such change made to the material, but we can highlight some of the more noticeable ones right here.
Stephen King, for one, has already acknowledged a shift that his constant readers picked up on in the trailers: in the novel, the Walkers are required to keep at a speed of four miles-per-hour or faster, otherwise they get a warning. In the movie, it was changed to a more reasonable pace of at least three miles-per-hour. According to producer Roy Lee, King asked to make the change for the film, stating, “There’s no way you could walk four miles an hour for that long.”
That seems a prudent realization, and one we imagine the filmmakers were already eying since having the characters rushing at a brisk walk the whole movie would make it more difficult to maintain the fraternal, and eventually wistful, character conversations and tone.
Similar changes include that in the novel there are 100 walkers chosen allegedly at random by a lottery—albeit then with a much more extensive screening and interview process which measures the candidates by mysterious standards. In the movie, it’s 50. Furthermore, one child represents each state in the U.S., whereas it was presented as a fluke that Garraty was a local boy from the state of Maine where the walk begins. This obviously makes it easier to have fewer characters—and more affordable to have fewer extras—in a narrative like this. It is likely for the same reason that while the Walkers pass crowds in nearly every small town they go through in the book, including Freeport, Maine where Garraty sees his mother, in the movie it is said that no crowds are allowed.
In the same vein, several of the tertiary Walkers are blended together. So while Ben Wang’s Mark Colson is both the braggart and unlikely young married man among the film’s contestants, the book’s Mark has no wife. However, a character named Scramm does—a bit of a two-dimensional hillbilly type with missing teeth from the Midwest. Scramm is also the most outwardly athletic boy, and the oddsmakers in Vegas think he’s the one to beat until he gets a cold. In the film, the more stealthily imposing Stebbins (Garrett Wareing) is both the obvious frontrunner and the one felled by an unlucky illness.
There are a number of other changes likely made for either time, budget, or medium constraints. There’s simply less space in a two hour movie for beats like the bit early in the book of Olson psyching out the competition, or a subplot about one of the boys’ mother (Percy, who does not appear in the movie) trying to call out to her son from various vantages on the side of the road until the government arrests her. But such changes are the nature of the beast.
