‘Unfilmable’ Stephen King movie jumps to number one on HBO Max after just one day

The film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Long Walk has raced to the top of HBO Max’s streaming charts just one day after arriving on the platform.

Originally released in theaters last year, the movie from Constantine director Francis Lawrence is based on a dystopian novel first published in 1979.

The film version spent decades in development hell and became considered “unfilmable.” Among the filmmakers attached to the project over the years were George Romero (Dawn of the Dead), in the late 1980s, and The Shawshank Redemption director Frank Darabont in the 2000s.

King himself was involved in the eventual adaptation and made one request of Lawrence and screenwriter JT Mollner (Strange Darling): that they up the violence.

“If you look at these superhero movies, you’ll see some supervillain who’s destroying whole city blocks, but you never see any blood,” King told The Times last year. “And man, that’s wrong. It’s almost, like, pornographic.”

He continued: “I said, if you’re not going to show it, don’t bother. And so they made a pretty brutal movie.”

Last July, screenwriter Mollner said at Comic-Con: “I knew that Stephen King wanted us to go all the way. I knew Lionsgate wanted us to go all the way. If this book got into the wrong hands, studio or filmmakers, it could’ve been neutered. So I’m very grateful we were able to keep the teeth that the book has.”

The Long Walk stars Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson and Mark Hamill, and centers on a televised competitive walking contest in which failure results in the death of the contestants.

Writing in praise of the film for The Independent last year, film critic Xan Brooks called it the “B-movie of the year.”

“Francis Lawrence’s dystopian thriller is a lean and hungry affair, thrown against a backdrop of distressed Americana (foreclosed houses; boarded-up shops),” wrote Brooks.

“Cooper (son of Philip Seymour) Hoffman gives a fine performance as stoic Ray Garraty, who squabbles and bonds with his fellow contestants during a forced march cross-country. The plot’s a rites-of-passage ramble gone horribly wrong; it’s Stand by Me (1986) by way of the battery farm. The contest is rigged and the cruelty is the point. First prize is your heart’s desire. Second prize, you’re fired. I liked The Monkey as well, but The Long Walk has the edge.”

During its theatrical release, the film made $63 million on a budget of $20 million.