Movies like The Long Walk

Why it's similar — A YA dystopia with a similar collision of teen-protagonist intimacy and grim systemic violence. The film is rougher than Lawrence's, but its premise — survivors trying to outlive a structure designed to consume them — sits in the same lane as King's contest, and the central friendship carries the moral weight in the way Garraty and McVries do.

Why it's similar — Joel Schumacher's adaptation of a numerological-obsession thriller shares the King-via-Bachman lineage of grim suburban paranoia. The mood is more Hitchcock-pastiche than dystopian endurance, but the film's commitment to a single fixed organising number — Schumacher's 23, Lawrence's three-miles-per-hour — gives both pictures a similar mechanical inevitability.

Why it's similar — A low-budget sci-fi-horror about ordinary people trapped inside a state-imposed perimeter, told from the inside without the spectacle of a wider war. The Long Walk operates by the same constraint — the country exists, but only the road and the soldiers on it are real to the walkers — and both films extract dread from the rules of the box rather than from anything outside it.

Why it's similar — Craig Zobel's Most-Dangerous-Game satire stages the same wager Lawrence's film builds on: an organised group of people hunted as entertainment by a state apparatus that has decided their lives are content. The Hunt is louder, faster and more openly comic, but the underlying contract — you are here to die for an audience — overlaps almost cleanly.

Why it's similar — Leigh Whannell's reinvention runs on the same procedural dread Lawrence uses: a protagonist forced to live by the rules of an antagonist who is offstage but constant. The Long Walk's soldiers are the unseen executors of a system, where Whannell's antagonist is the system itself made literal, but both films keep the threat ambient rather than spectacular.