When Stephen King first wrote The Running Man in 1973, the year 2025 felt like it would never come.
The author was an angry young man living in the midst of turbulent times and trying to find his way in an unforgiving world. Writing under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, King created a dystopian 2025 in which the wealthy enjoy unthinkable luxury while the poor struggle to merely survive. Many turn to dangerous game shows offering cash rewards for ridiculous risks.
Desperate to buy medicine for his young daughter, Ben Richards (Glen Powell) finds himself cast on The Running Man, the all-powerful Network’s premiere series in which a contestant must evade a clan of highly-skilled assassins sent to murder him on live TV.
Published in 1982, The Running Man is an outlier in King’s massive body of work. It stands alongside The Long Walk (also named for a violent game show) as a deft satire on the economic gap and a corrupt government determined to cannibalize its citizens. Needless to say, the story feels eerily prophetic now that we’ve reached the year in which it was originally set. While our 2025 feels in some ways different from the industrial hellscape Ben must navigate, other elements of the story could be ripped from current headlines or social media posts.
The Running Man is now available to buy or rent, along with over two and a half hours of bonus content. To celebrate this exciting digital release, Bloody Disgusting sat down with genre icon Edgar Wright to chat about co-writing and directing this action-packed film and bringing King’s haunting predictions to the screen.
L-r, Katy O’Brian, Colman Domingo, Glen Powell and Martin Herlihy star in Paramount Pictures’ “THE RUNNING MAN.”
Bloody Disgusting: What’s your Stephen King origin story, and what drew you to the Running Man?
Edgar Wright: Well, I guess even before reading him, growing up, I was certainly aware of that name on the front of paperbacks. That meant horror. The first film adaptation I saw … I want to say it was Cujo, probably on TV. But the first books I read were the short story compilations Night Shift and Skeleton Crew when I was about 12 or 13.
I first read The Running Man when it was part of The Bachman Books [collection], which came out in the mid-80s. I probably read it when I was 14, before I’d seen the 1987 film. So when I saw that Arnold Schwarzenegger film, even though I enjoyed it, I was well aware that it was radically different from the book.
BD: Was there any part of you that was tempted to lean towards Paul Michael Glaser’s version, or did you want to do a more faithful adaptation of the original novella?
EW: The 1987 movie is its own thing, and there wasn’t really any need to remake it. I feel like the best remakes are ones that do something different. In this case, it wasn’t so much doing something different from that 1987 film as just doing a more faithful adaptation of the book. I thought, actually, the whole reason for doing it was because I knew there was a whole novel’s worth of material that hadn’t been adapted before.
BD: Any Stephen King film is going to have its share of Easter eggs, and The Running Man includes one of the best I’ve ever seen. In the locker room, when Ben finds out what show he’s been cast on, other lockers are labeled with the names of actors from previous King adaptations like Walken, Nicholson, Spacek, and Katt. I was so excited to catch those references! Are you a fan of any other Stephen King adaptations, and did you draw inspiration from previous films for The Running Man?
EW: Yeah, absolutely. I think my favorite one is actually the first one, which is Carrie. I absolutely adore that film. And obviously, there are so many other ones. You know, The Shining, Cujo, The Dead Zone, Christine. R.I.P. Rob Reiner, who directed two of the best in Stand By Me and Misery. Obviously, Shawshank Redemption is amazing. There are many that I enjoy.
I don’t know if any of them specifically influenced this film because the books he wrote under the name Richard Bachman were usually in different genres from horror. And this one is. It’s quite unusual in his whole canon because it is more of a dystopian future action suspense book. There’s nothing really like it in the rest of his books. So there wasn’t really anything in terms of direct inspiration from the other adaptations.
BD: There is a stark difference. As a fan of that novella, I know how bleak it is. My biggest question going into the film was, how is it going to end? I love the way you approached King’s original ending because I read your conclusion as hopeful. Was hope and empowerment your intent?
I think, very early on, it wasn’t even a question. The ending of the book has some unfortunate real-life parallels to an event that happened after the book was written and published. So we weren’t gonna go there because I think it would have been in bad taste. The ending in the book is famously nihilistic and bleak, but also has an element of revenge. So we thought, well, what if we lost the fire but kept the spark of revolution? So it still has a revenge element, just in a different way.
Glen Powell stars in Paramount Pictures’ “THE RUNNING MAN.”
I love how you tied it into the zine culture as well, because it really feels like a grassroots movement that’s building up. The original story was written in the 70s in the era of game shows like Press Your Luck and Dialing for Dollars, but your adaptation feels more informed by reality TV. I particularly loved the concept of the three contestant archetypes. Are you a fan of competition reality television?
I guess at a certain point, in the last 25 years, they’re unavoidable. I think when they first started, I did watch more, because especially in the U.K. — and I know it’s exactly the same in the States — they’re just completely ubiquitous. Obviously, the States have formats that are still going, like Survivor and American Idol. In the U.K., there are some formats like Big Brother that are still on the air 25 years later. The thing that was fun about writing this is that, unlike the book, we had 25 years of reality TV and talk shows. I guess it wasn’t just reality TV, it’s all the combative talk shows as well. I think in more recent years, people have started to understand how those shows are made. There have been quite a few peeks behind the curtain.
One of the things I think is wildly pressing about the book is that Stephen King was able to predict the future in terms of the way that TV would go. I had the chance to talk to him, and I asked him what it was like in 1973 when he first wrote the book, although it wasn’t published until 1982. What did you see that gave you the inspiration for what was going on behind the scenes in the C-suite of TV? Obviously, there were game shows on TV then, but he said that Big Time Wrestling gave him the idea because obviously, there’s an element of fabrication. It’s not real. There’s a narrative, and somebody has to be the villain. But then I think also, reality shows have a formula, and they’ll cast members of the public to fit into those archetypes. When Bradley (Daniel Ezra), who’s the super fan who has his wild conspiracies about the show. He’s watched the show and can say, “Hey, this is the way it works.”
You also have The Americanos, too, which feels more like the Bravo side of reality television. I particularly loved that Ben kind of begrudgingly finds himself sucked into that story. How does that style of reality television fit into this world?
We like the idea that in this sort of retro, futuristic 2025 in the movie, everybody has a state-mandated 65-inch plasma. It’s the TV that you can’t turn off, so people are just forced to watch this. There are several points in the movie where, if he’s being strategic, he’s just hiding out, but having to watch hours of this show that he hates.
Michael Cera stars in Paramount Pictures’ “The Running Man.”
I want to ask about Ben, because I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Glen Powell so angry! How does he embody the Ben Richards character, and what kind of energy did you envision?
That was straight from the book. Ben Richards is a very angry man in the book. I think when Stephen King wrote it in his late 20s, early 30s, he was an angry young man at the time. It obviously comes from a sense of righteous fury and frustration, his place in the world, and being punished for doing the right thing.
When we first talked to Glen about it, I said to him that I needed Bad Mood Glen. He’s such a nice and charming guy that it was actually kind of hard for him to tap into, I wouldn’t say a darker side, but an energy where he’s the guy that stands up to bullies. It’s obviously a tough future where you’re not given any medals for doing the right thing. In fact, you’re punished for it.
I think on the opposite end of that spectrum, we have Michael Cera as Elton Perrakis, who has been building this entire resistance system. Then, when it actually comes down to the moment where he has to make a choice, it’s almost like he can’t help himself, and he has to gleefully push the button.
That was a really fun idea and one of the changes from the book. In the book, Victoria (Sandra Dickinson), his mom, is the one who pushes the emergency button. It was actually a note from Mike Ireland, the former head of Paramount, who said after the first draft, that between Bradley and Elton, who are both people helping him in the underground. He gave the greatest studio note ever. He said, “One of these guys has got to screw him over.” And we were like, huh, interesting. We thought, well, we don’t want Elton to be a baddie, but what if he’s a massive liability? It was one of our favorite changes from draft to draft, the moment where Michael’s character can’t help but call the cops. We’ve set up this idea that he wants revenge, and I think the fun thing is that Elton is one of the heroes, but he’s a wild card.
Well, no spoilers, but the ending of the story has to do with whether or not to accept a lucrative deal. And then we also have Evan McCone (Lee Pace) on the other side of that equation, who is a larger presence in your film than he is in the original story. Why did you want to build out McCone’s character, and are you making a statement about complicity and compliance?
I think it was an idea that maybe in the first season, somebody had come too close to winning, and that wasn’t necessarily going to be good for the show, so rather than create this idea that The Running Man is too easy, they gave him a way out, but that way out wasn’t necessarily an answer. Without giving too much away, as Lee Pace’s character explains it, this is not a happy ending either. In fact, this could be your hell on earth. I think it’s similar to the book in that you’re not giving Ben Richards any easy solutions at the end, and complicity with the Network is something he’s not willing to do. Even in his final seconds, that’s still who he is. To come in and take the money would be complicity, and he would very much be on the wrong side of history.
One of the things that I was stunned by was, considering when the original novella was written, some of Ben’s messages are things I’m hearing today. Why is now a good time to tell this story?
Well, I think you just answered your own question. [Laughs] Weirdly, I would say that things became even more prescient as we were making the movie. We started on the script in early 2022, and obviously, we were filming it until spring of this year. There’s a point where news moves so fast that the fiction part of the science fiction is starting to fade away. But we didn’t necessarily see that as a negative. We felt like, if it feels like you’re looking five minutes into the future, then maybe that’s a good thing.
The Running Man is available to buy or rent now on digital with over two and a half hours of bonus content from Paramount Home Entertainment.
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