Netflix’s Squid Game is the South Korean survival drama that people have compared to a number of past films, including The Hunger Games and Battle Royale.
However, now that the show has officially been declared the streaming service’s most successful series of all time, now would be the perfect time for Hollywood to strike while the iron is hot and bring even more properties of the niche subgenre to the silver screen for the very first time.
If you’re not familiar with Squid Game, the show centers around cash-strapped people recruited by a shadowy organization to compete in a series of children’s games whose ultimate prize is a life-changing sum of money. However, if they lose any of the games, they die, and only one winner can ultimately be declared.
The premise actually bears a striking resemblance to a 1970s Stephen King novel. Despite King’s many movie and TV adaptations, 1979’s The Long Walk has never made a screen debut, as ScreenRant points out.
The novel is a dystopian tale in which 100 teenage boys walk over 4 miles per hour until only one is left standing to win a prize. If any of the contestants go under the minimum speed, they’re shot and eliminated.
Though New Line Cinema did announce a movie adaptation for The Long Walk back in 2018, we’ve heard very little about the film’s development since.
Interestingly, King has published another death game book under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1982. That story was eventually adapted into the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger-helmed action romp The Running Man. We’ll have to wait and see if The Long Walk ever experiences a similar adaptation.
You can catch all nine episodes of Squid Game on Netflix now.
