Glen Powell has Arnold Schwarzenegger’s blessing for Edgar Wright’s The Running Man film – but it was tough to make.
This November will see the release of Edgar Wright’s The Running Man. It’s a take on Stephen King’s novel of the same name that imagines a future dystopian US where violent game shows are the ‘opiate of the masses’. America’s particular favourite being The Running Man, a nightly show where hunters chase contestants across the country, killing them for the satisfaction of the viewers at home.
Stephen King’s book has already been adapted for the screen once before, with the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger action vehicle keeping lots of the basic plot elements but jettisoning King’s bleak tone in favour of something more bombastic. After all, ‘it was acceptable in the 80s’, as the song goes.
Baby Driver director Edgar Wright has already confirmed (to Empire) that his version will hew closer to the source material, saying that “one of the things about the book that I loved was the fact that Ben Richards is out in the world on his own, so it’s like the deadliest game of hide and seek. It does feel like making a road movie in a lot of ways: a very intense, dangerous road movie. Ben is moving through different environments and meeting different people as he tries to survive 30 days out in the wild.”
Read more: The Running Man | What might Edgar Wright’s new adaptation of Stephen King’s novel look like?
Still, as different as it might be from the Schwarzenegger film, as the new Running Man, Glen Powell still wanted to show respect to Schwarzenegger for being the first cinematic take on Ben Richards. As such, Powell has told People he and Wright got to FaceTime with Schwarzenegger:
‘Arnold gave us his blessing. Patrick Schwarzenegger is a great friend of mine and I asked Patrick if I could talk to Arnold and I hadn’t seen Arnold since we shot Expendables in Bulgaria. Arnold gave us his full blessing and we get to give Arnold a very specific fun gift from the movie in a couple of weeks here. So I’m very excited to see him.’
What that gift may be, who knows. Could the new version also go for lycra jumpsuits? Does Arnold still wear his original 1987 one to work out in? These are the questions that we need answers to, but instead we’ll just have to speculate.
While promoting the film at CinemaCon last week, the actor said that working on The Running Man was ‘the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life’, adding that his body was ‘thrashed’ and ‘smashed’ during the production.
We’re looking forwards to seeing all of those efforts on the screen when the film – which also stars Colman Domingo, Josh Brolin (both in villainous roles) and Love Lies Bleeding's Katy O’Brian in the cast – hits cinemas in early November.
