After years of silence, confirmation comes that Edgar Wright is still working on The Running Man.
It was all the way back in 2021 when it was announced that Edgar Wright would be directing an adaptation of The Running Man for Paramount. Both the world (and especially the film industry) have been in a topsy-turvy place ever since and with no announcements forthcoming, we were beginning to wonder if this one had quietly disappeared.
That would have been a shame given that the Last Night In Soho director has publicly called it his dream project, not to mention that the film was said to veer closer to Stephen King’s darker source material than the 1987 Paul Michael Glaser film that starred Arnold Schwarzenegger in a fetching lycra jumpsuit.
However, thanks to Slashfilm, producer Simon Kinberg was tracked down and questioned on the status of the project – and he revealed that it’s very much alive, and that Wright and writer Michael Ball (no, not that one) are working on the script as we speak.
“Yeah, he’s [Wright] one of my favourite directors of all time and one of my favourite people,” Kinberg told the outlet in a gushing ramble that we’ve edited here for brevity.
“We are working on it actively. He’s actively working on the script with Michael Bacall. And our hope would be that it is a movie that […] Edgar could maybe direct next year… What’s cool is that Edgar, completely separately, before myself and Paramount started down the journey of figuring out how to get the remake rights […]had tweeted […] that if there was one movie he would remake ever, it was The Running Man.”
In King’s original story – which he wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bachman – protagonist Ben Richards is a ‘former police officer who is imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, and forced to participate in an entertainment program titled The Running Man, where prisoners compete to win their freedom.’ The story is set in a grim, futuristic dystopia and will certainly mark another style change for a filmmaker who loves to experiment with form and genre. We’ll be intrigued to see whether Wright keeps the novel’s original ending.
Rest assured we’ll keep you updated as we hear more on this one, including a scheduled shoot date when that news does emerge.
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