Edgar Wright is officially making The Running Man, a new version of Stephen King’s novel last adapted in 1987. Here’s how it could differ from that earlier one:
Most readers would likely agree that The Running Man isn’t the best of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cycle of action movie vehicles from the 1980s and early 1990s, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t memorable. If you’ve seen it, you can probably quote a line or two (“Sub-Zero… now plain zero!”), or remember Richard Dawson’s captivatingly oily turn as game show host, Jack Killian.
You might recall the almost musical note that one of the villains, Buzzsaw (Gus Rethwisch), manages to hit when a chainsaw’s applied to his nether regions. Or even remember the bafflement of seeing rockers Mick Fleetwood and Dweezil Zappa show up (this writer did, anyway).
Directed by Paul Michael Glaser and written by Steven E de Souza, The Running Man casts Schwarzenegger as Ben Richards, a police helicopter pilot imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, and then coaxed into appearing on the titular gameshow. Hosted by Killian, The Running Man sees its contestants hunted across a Los Angeles wasteland by a quartet of ‘stalkers’, each with their own nickname and gimmick, like WWE wrestlers.
It’s a big, loud film as only an action flick made in the 1980s can be, with lots of gore and plenty of quips. It even has a dance routine choreographed by Paula Abdul. The thing about The Running Man movie, though, is that it has little in common with the Stephen King novel of the same name.
First published in 1982 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, The Running Man is a dark stiletto of a novel. King has said that he wrote it in a matter of days in the early 1970s, and it shows: it’s lean and fast-paced; in the place of chapter headings, its events are punctuated by a countdown that appears every couple of pages or so (“…Minus 094 and COUNTING…”), propelling the reader along and giving its events an air of grim inevitability.
The Running Man is essentially George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four for the TV age. Its opening pages, with their descriptions of compulsory televisions, run-down apartments and the smell of boiled cabbage, sound like a conscious allusion to Orwell’s seminal dystopia. In The Running Man, King imagines his own dark future where the gap between rich and poor is such that the two classes have their own separate currencies – Old Dollars and New Dollars, one worth more than the other. The impoverished are packed into slums with no access to decent food or medical care. The whole planet appears to be on the cusp of economic, environmental and social collapse.
On those state-mandated televisions (called Free-Vees), an endless string of murderous game shows play. In one, called Treadmill To Bucks, contestants with heart conditions and other grave illnesses stomp along on a running machine, answering questions in the hope of winning a few dollars. Inevitably, most contestants die before they can spend their winnings.
We’re then introduced to Ben Richards, who cuts an altogether different figure from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s incarnation. In his late 20s, he’s tall, lean and desperate; his 18 month-old daughter is feverish and flu-laden, and Richards has no money for a doctor or medication. Ignoring his wife’s desperate pleas, Richards enters The Running Man – like the later movie, a game show that sees its contestants mercilessly hunted on live television. Richards stands to win 100 New Dollars for every hour he can stay alive; if he somehow lives until day 30, he’ll get a billion New Dollars. To date, nobody has ever won the grand prize.
Unlike the film, Richards isn’t hunted around confined zones; he’s free to go where he wants, and the story sees him travelling between US cities with Hunters in close pursuit. Members of the public are also encouraged to join in the hunt, with cash prizes if they phone the Games Network – the company behind the show – with sightings of a contestant’s whereabouts.
The Running Man is a bleak, grim novel, with King writing in a terse style akin to a noir thriller. Richards – a tough-talking Bourbon enthusiast – could easily have come from a Jim Thompson or Donald E Westlake story, and the character’s described as an anachronism more than once in the book’s first half. He’s an embittered character, and King’s worldview is no less despairing: he imagines a 21st century where the only escape from poverty is to enter one of the Games Network’s shows; this in turn gives the network a ready supply of contestants, which in turn feeds an entertainment machine engineered to keep the populace entertained and pacified.
Although later dystopian stories like Battle Royale and The Hunger Games may have borrowed from The Running Man, King in turn was possibly inspired by Robert Sheckley’s 1958 short story, The Prize Of Peril, which is also about an ordinary guy who takes part in a murderous game show. It was adapted for the screen twice, first as a German TV movie in 1970 and a French film in 1983. The director of the latter, Yves Boisset, later sued the producers of The Running Man for plagiarism.
The irony here is that Boisset’s film, Le Prix du Danger, actually feels more like an adaptation of King’s The Running Man than the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. Its action takes place across a wider location (in this case, Paris); its protagonist becomes unexpectedly popular with the public, as Ben does in the book; and it all builds to a downbeat conclusion – albeit far less shocking than King’s.
Given just how different 1987’s The Running Man was to the source material, it’s unsurprising that a filmmaker would eventually come along and try to make a more faithful adaptation of it. The only slight surprise is that the filmmaker who’s embarking on that adaptation is Edgar Wright – a director whose previous work, which includes Shaun Of The Dead and Baby Driver, is so colourful and effervescent.
Wright has previously expressed his affection for King’s novel, however, and rightly pointed out that “they didn’t really adapt the book” back in 1986. On the Happy Sad Confused podcast last year, Wright explained that the opportunity to make The Running Man came from producer Simon Kinberg. When Kinberg asked the filmmaker whether he was interested in the novel, Wright replied, “I’ve often thought that that book is crying out to be adapted.”
Wright’s take on The Running Man will be written by Michael Bacall, previously best known for his comedies; he co-wrote Scott Pilgrim Vs The World for Wright as well as the comedy thrillers 21 Jump Street and 22 Jump Street. This might imply that the new adaptation will adopt a lighter, more satirical tone than King’s book; Glen Powell, who’s signed up to star as the new Ben Richards, recently described the script as ‘Outrageous’.
Whatever tone Wright tries to strike with The Running Man – and it’s unlikely Wright will keep the book’s ending – its story is still remarkably current, even if it was written over 50 years ago. Television may have been overtaken by social media as the dominant medium, but its depiction of a near future where society watches its own oppression unfold in real-time remains a hugely effective one.
Rising star Glen Powell is a logical choice to play the smart, aggressively driven Richards. All we need now is the right actor to play Killian. In the book, he’s a producer rather than a TV host, but he might be one of the most charismatically unpleasant antagonists in any of King’s stories. As he chillingly tells Richards early in The Running Man, smiling with his ice white teeth:
“The program is one of the surest ways the Network has of getting rid of embryo troublemakers such as yourself, Mr Richards… People won’t be in the bars and hotels or gathering in the cold in front of appliance stores, rooting for you to get away. Goodness! No. They want to see you wiped out, and they’ll help if they can.”
With an opponent like that, we can’t help but cheer Ben Richards on right to the bitter end.
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