20 Recent Movies You Had NO IDEA Were Box Office Hits
15. The Long Walk
Though Stephen King adaptations often equate to box office gravy, The Long Walk is undeniably one of the trickiest-to-adapt works in King's entire oeuvre.
Even deemed "unfilmable" once upon a time, the dystopian survival thriller about a competitive walking contest to the death was finally brought to the big screen last year, though many doubted its potential to succeed commercially.
Beyond the inherent challenge of making a film centered around walking cinematic, there's the fact that director Francis Lawrence was granted an R rating, allowing him to fully lean into the gory grimness of King's novel while only further lowering the ceiling on the film's box office prospects.
Yet rave reviews and a sensibly low budget of just $20 million propelled The Long Walk to a $63.1 million final cume.
While this obviously doesn't rank it among the biggest smash hit Stephen King adaptations, it is a totally respectable tripling of its low production costs, without even mentioning that it dominated the global streaming charts after hitting VOD.