Stephen King Calls Superhero Movies 'P**nographic' And Fans Are Losing It

Stephen King is back on the megaphone about superhero movies, and while he is swinging hard, this time the argument is not totally off base. The kicker: it is tied to The Long Walk, his next big-screen adaptation, which is shaping up to be a tough sit in exactly the way it should be.

King wanted The Long Walk to actually show the horror

King told The Times UK he gave director Francis Lawrence one non-negotiable note before Lawrence adapted his book: do not flinch. The story is about teenagers forced to keep walking or get shot. King insisted the film show that reality.

"I said, if you are not going to show it, do not bother. And so they made a pretty brutal movie."

That is a bracing stance from a guy who has been loudly pro-gun-control for years and has blocked his own controversial school-hostage novel, Rage, from ever being adapted. On paper, insisting on depicting kids being shot while also refusing to license Rage sounds contradictory. In practice, it is about honesty to the premise: if The Long Walk soft-pedals what happens, there is no point in making it.

His swipe at superhero movies, and why it lands (mostly)

King used caped blockbusters as the counterexample for how violence gets sanded down until it barely reads as violence at all. As he put it to The Times:

"If you look at these superhero movies, you will see some supervillain who is destroying whole city blocks, but you never see any blood."

"And man, that is wrong. It is almost, like, p**nographic."

I take his 'p**nographic' line to mean the films push up to the edge of consequence without ever showing it — a softcore vibe where the tease is the point. He is not wrong that the MCU and friends treat mass destruction like confetti. But there is a bigger, very unsexy reason: four-quadrant PG-13 business. Avengers and Spider-Man are built for maximum audiences, including kids. If a character with super-strength actually pulped someone on screen, that is an R rating, easy.

We do get the R-rated outliers — Deadpool, The Suicide Squad — but even there the gore is so cartoonishly dialed up that it feels like splatter comedy, not reality. Superhero worlds are fantasy by design. No one asks where the insurance adjusters are after the skyscraper falls, because the movies are not trying to be our world. The Long Walk is. Different goals, different tools.

So, where I land on this

Two things can be true: King is right that The Long Walk needs to show what it is actually about, or it loses its punch; and studios are right that most superhero movies should not look like a medical textbook, because that is not what those movies are selling. The good news is we can have both. Not everything needs to mirror real life — that is literally why we go to the movies — but when a story demands it, do not blink.

The Long Walk: the essentials

• Release date: September 12, 2025
• Runtime: 108 minutes
• Rating: R
• Director: Francis Lawrence
• Writers: JT Mollner, Stephen King
• Producers: Roy Lee, Steven Schneider
• Cast: Cooper Hoffman as Raymond Garraty / #47; David Jonsson as Peter McVries / #23; Garrett Wareing as Stebbins / #38; Tut Nyuot as Arthur Baker / #6
• Early word: critics have praised it as 'brutal and unforgiving in its execution'