Edgar Wright hews close to Stephen King’s novel in his adaptation of The Running Man.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Stephen King published several novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman before being outed in 1984. One of those was The Running Man, later adapted into a star vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger. There’s a new adaptation on the horizon courtesy of director Edgar Wright (Sean of the Dead, Ant-Man, Baby Driver, Last Night in Soho), and Paramount just dropped the trailer for The Running Man (2025).
(Spoilers for the 1982 book and 1987 movie below.)
King wrote the original novel in just one week. It’s set in a dystopian 2025 hellscape (making Wright’s film particularly timely), with the global economy in a state of collapse and a totalitarian government ruling the US. The protagonist, Ben Richards, lives in “Co-Op City” with his wife and seriously ill daughter, unable to work because he was blacklisted. So he decides to compete on a deadly game show called The Running Man. He is declared an enemy of the state and given a 12-hour head start before an elite team of Hunters (i.e., assassins) chase after him. He’s also required to post videotaped messages every day.
The goal: survive a full 30 days in order to win the grand prize of $1 billion. Of course, no contestant has ever survived that long; the record is 197 hours. But Ben gets a certain amount of money each day he survives, and for each Hunter he manages to kill, so there’s still a financial incentive to help his suffering family. Ben ends up doing better than anyone ever expected, but the deck is stacked against him. And King isn’t exactly known for indulging in many happy endings.
The 1987 action film starring Schwarzenegger was only loosely based on King’s novel, preserving the basic concept and very little else in favor of more sci-fi gadgetry and high-octane action. (For one thing, King conceived of Ben as initially being “scrawny” and “pre-tubercular,” not a well-muscled action hero.) It was a noisy, entertaining romp and very late ’80s, but it lacked King’s subtler satirical tone.
