Edgar Wright has made a new adaptation of The Running Man. How does it compare to the book and 1987 movie? A spoiler-free look: The Running Man wasn’t the first story to imagine a future of murderous game shows, but when it was first published in 1982, the concept still felt fresh. In the decades since, ... The Running Man | Can Edgar Wright make a decades-old novel feel relevant in 2025?
Edgar Wright has made a new adaptation of The Running Man. How does it compare to the book and 1987 movie? A spoiler-free look:
The Running Man wasn’t the first story to imagine a future of murderous game shows, but when it was first published in 1982, the concept still felt fresh.
In the decades since, however, we’ve seen numerous other writers and filmmakers tackle similar subjects, from Battle Royale to The Hunger Games to Squid Game. Stephen King’s original novel is decades old, and so too is its first film adaptation. Which begs the question: can director and co-writer Edgar Wright make The Running Man feel relevant for a new generation of film-goers?
First, a bit of backstory.
Although published in 1982, The Running Man was written in the 1970s, before King became a phenomenon with such horror novels as Carrie (his debut) and The Shining.
Released under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, The Running Man was an Orwellian sci-fi thriller for the age of mass entertainment, depicting a distant future (2025!) of totalitarian rule and gladiatorial TV game shows. The 1987 film adaptation, directed by Paul Michael Glaser, twisted the book into an action vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger, then at the height of his chiseled fame.
That movie removed protagonist Ben Richards’ wife and sick child, not to mention a singularly downbeat ending, but kept at least a hint of its grit and nastiness. It also felt entirely of a piece with an era of MTV, pumped-up wrestlers and greed-is-good Reaganomics, with the Running Man show at the story’s centre providing a distraction for an oppressed and desperately poor working class.
Director and co-writer Edgar Wright’s new adaptation hews closer to the book’s events than the previous movie did, but still fuses it with the director’s flamboyant filmmaking style. This means there’s still a hint of 1980s outrageousness, including a line of dancers in the titular gameshow (Paula Abdul famously choreographed the glittery, spandex-clad routine in the Arnie flick).
This time, it’s Glen Powell as Ben Richards, a working joe who loses his job and desperately needs money to pay for his sick daughter’s medication. Despite the protestations of his waitress wife Sheila (Jayme Lawson), Richards signs up as a contestant at the Network – an all-powerful corporation that controls the government, the police, and keeps the populace amused with a string of TV shows in which ordinary people compete in demeaning, murderous contests in the hope of winning cash prizes.
Perhaps realising that audiences have seen Battle Royale, The Hunger Games and the like, Wright speedruns through the process of getting Ben from his bunker-like apartment to the acrylic-slick office belonging to Dan Killian (Josh Brolin, teeth clad in Hollywood white veneers) – the TV producer who sees a potential ratings phenomenon in Richards.
Killian decides to put Richards on The Running Man – the Network’s show in which contestants – painted as criminals by the show’s producers – are sent off on a sprint across America, relentlessly pursued by a gang of armed Hunters.
The public is actively encouraged to get involved, with money offered to anyone who can offer tip-offs for a Runner’s whereabouts. The longer a Runner survives, the more they’ll win for their families; if they can keep out of trouble for 30 days, they’ll receive a king’s ransom as a star prize. To date, no Runner has made it to the end of the show.
Read more: Exclusive: Stephen King approves of the new ending in Edgar Wright’s The Running Man
With a history of insubordination and a quick temper, Richards’ superpower is his anger and sheer force of will – something Ben himself thinks will help him succeed where other contestants have failed. One refrain in the movie is a variation on the line, “You think you’re gonna be the one who’ll stop me from seeing my daughter again?” – and Powell’s spittle-flecked, sinewy performance is such that it’s easy to buy into his determination.
King’s book was dappled with black humour – as displayed in the brief description of a show in which people with heart conditions are forced to run on a treadmill until they expire. But it was also desperately bleak, something that runs somewhat counter to Wright’s puppyish energy. His resulting dystopia is an odd mix of horrifying socio-political implications and jazzy action sequences cut to an up-tempo score.
Just as Baby Driver was Wright’s take on a high-octane, 1970s-style car chase movie, so The Running Man is a futuristic nightmare studded with flashy editing tricks and eye-spinning whip-pans. It almost shouldn’t work, and yet there’s a pace and sincerity to the writing and direction that makes it irresistible; it’s a thrill to see how Ben will get out of the next close call, or how he’ll use the rules of the game to his own advantage.
Wright’s Running Man also takes the action out of the 1987 film’s underground arena, allowing for the wider storytelling canvas of King’s book. The occasional lapses in pace and tension initially suggest that the earlier film had the right idea; the trade-off is that Wright gets to vary the film’s texture and tone, as Richards passes from glistening airports to rat-ridden slums to an American Gothic country pile and beyond. Gradually, characters like Michael Cera’s harebrained underground magazine editor chip away at Ben’s me-against-the-world attitude, exposing the hidden cogs behind Killian’s game.
In a curious 2025 movie trend, The Running Man is the latest film to display a rebellious, even revolutionary spirit. Other films released this year have also felt like a clanging alarm bell about the state of modern America, whether it’s the toxicity and division wrought by big tech in Eddington or the threat of militarised fascism in The Long Walk (also based on a King book) or One Battle After Another.
Wright and Michael Bacall’s script constantly highlights that the games are a propaganda tool, designed to divide the poor among themselves while the powerful remain safe at the top of the social tree. A clear line is drawn between the fictional Running Man and real-world mass entertainment, whether it’s reality TV or social media.
Gaudy in its presentation and almost kitsch in its wise-cracking good guy and its steely-eyed villains, The Running Man as much a throwback as the notion that people would be entranced by a game show rather than, say, a Twitch stream or an unboxing video on YouTube.
But paradoxically, there are elements in the story that feel more relevant than ever. The notion that footage could be so flawlessly doctored that we can no longer trust our own eyes fits right into our current era of generative AI. Having a state and media relentlessly tell us that it’s the poorest and most vulnerable in society that are our enemies – and not, say, the billionaires with the power – certainly rings true.
Unabashedly gory, violent and foul-mouthed – the language suggesting that the gradual coarsening of politics will one day swamp all media – The Running Man emerges as an unexpectedly bold adaptation. Not just because expensive, R-rated action movies are more of a risk than they were in the 1980s, but also because it dares to have a nakedly left-of-centre angle on where the world is in the 2020s. We may not have gladiatorial shows on TV just yet, but the film’s depiction of a riven society trained to hate each other rings worryingly true.
Wright’s latest opus is a timely, satisfyingly defiant middle finger to all of it.
The Running Man is out in UK cinemas from the 12th November.
