The Running Man: Edgar Wright’s Bold Take on King’s 1982 Novel

Paramount Pictures has shared the first trailer for Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, bringing the iconoclastic director to Stephen King’s dystopian thriller for the first time. Originally published as a novel in 1982 under King’s pseudonym Richard Bachman, The Running Man was made into a 1987 action film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. That entry in Schwarzenegger’s notorious Terminator series has more in common with the Alien franchise than The Running Man, however, so Wright’s new movie, which arrives in theaters on November 7, 2025, will serve as the more official adaptation of King’s original, savage satire.

Published under the pseudonym “Richard Bachman” in 1982, The Running Man is set in a dystopian version of the United States in 2025, as it reaches the point of collapse. Society has become thoroughly totalitarian, and the population is placated and distracted by what might be the 1980s equivalent of Black Mirror. The number one show on television, watched by 99.9% of Americans, is The Running Man: a fight to the death. Competitors for the title of “The One Who Lives” are pitted against an army of Hunters with only a vague and poorly defined rule set to help them survive.

Stephen King wrote The Running Man in less than a week in 1982. It is the second book he published as Richard Bachman, with The Long Walk preceding it in 1979. King kept the secret of Richard Bachman alive until 1984, when both he and his editor at the time were unmasked in a St. Petersburg Times investigation into Bachman’s five books and his common themes.

The story of The Running Man, like The Long Walk, takes place in the United States and follows a “working man” called Ben Richards. He lives in a place known as “Co-Op City” with his wife and gravely ill daughter. Blacklisted as a political troublemaker, Richards is out of work and on the brink of poverty. After his daughter dies and his wife loses her job, Richards is driven to enter The Running Man and attempt to win its billion-dollar prize. Ben’s path to the show is cajoled by the heavy-handed Dan Killian (Josh Brolin), who manipulates him into turning from prey to predator on the “gladiator run.”

What follows is as straightforward as it is chilling. Contestants live for a month and win one billion dollars. While it has never been done, the prize is alluring: the previous record stands at 197 hours. For every 24 hours a Runner lives, they win ten million dollars in cash, which is deposited in a bank account maintained for them by the show. Each Hunter dispatched nets them another million. The prize is theoretically fair, at least, because no one expects them to survive, and anyone can enter if they are desperate enough. In a reversal of the normal flow of income and power, desperate men on the fringes of society are the only ones who can afford to play.

Ben Richards survives and does much better than anyone might have expected—too well. He captures the hearts of a nation, but only one man, the President of the United States, is willing to acknowledge Richards as a legitimate hero.

The 1987 film The Running Man is a loose adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. The basic premises remain the same: a sadistic, militarized dystopia where the populace is kept docile by watching violent game shows on TV. The game itself changes very little: professional killers hunt desperate men in a race to the end. But the film swaps out King’s hyper-violent social commentary for ’80s sci-fi, embracing its blockbuster lead and the technological excess of the time. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Ben Richards is less “scrawny” and “pre-tubercular” than King’s is, and the movie is louder, flashier, and more fun—but with far less of the pathos and biting satire at the core of the original novel.

The film rights to The Running Man first attracted Edgar Wright’s attention in 2017, though it would be three more years before he and writer Michael Bacall got to work with the go-ahead from Paramount. Wright has previously stated his intention to maintain fidelity to King’s original novel while updating and modernizing the film in the right places. The new trailer suggests his approach will be successful.

Glen Powell stars as the world-weary Ben Richards, trading his habitual charm for a more hardened and desperate vibe, while Josh Brolin is the show’s producer Dan Killian. Brolin, Killian, and a key supporting cast member named Evan McCone (Lee Pace) manipulate the game to the greatest degree and find themselves pushed into a resistance movement by Richards’s popularity. Josh Brolin’s Dan Killian first befriends and then pits Ben Richards against the Hunters. Ben’s wife is played by Jayme Lawson as Sheila Richards, while Colman Domingo is Bobby Thompson, the host of The Running Man. Michael Cera is Bradley Throckmorton, a notable figure in the resistance, while William H. Macy, David Zayas, Emilia Jones, Karl Glusman, Katy O’Brian, and Daniel Ezra have also been cast in supporting roles.

The big question about The Running Man now is how dark it will be. Stephen King’s ending is more bleak than hopeful, but The Running Man trailer promises a violent, absorbing world in which viewers and audience members get a front row seat. As both killing and watching feel worse by the year, an adaptation of The Running Man will likely offer a mirror on its 2025 release.

There’s more where that came from in 2025. Stephen King wrote another dystopian, Bachman-sounding “man against government” battle-of-the-dead entry in 1979 called The Long Walk. That book is due for a new film adaptation with a release date of September 12, 2025, according to IMDb, or two months before The Running Man hits the big screen. Both books focus on competition, television, cruelty, and survival, but which one will get the more faithful adaptation?