- calendar_today August 19, 2025
Wright’s Running Man Sets the Stage for a Dark 2025 Dystopia
Paramount Pictures has just released the first trailer for Edgar Wright’s The Running Man (2025), a new adaptation of Stephen King’s 1982 dystopian action-thriller novel, published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym. It arrives 38 years after an Arnold Schwarzenegger-starring action flick of the same name was released, and aims to be far more faithful to the original story.
The late ‘70s and early ‘80s saw several Bachman titles come to publication, but King was outed in 1984 before his identity as the mystery author was made public. King wrote The Running Man in just a week, and the resulting story endures as one of his best-loved works.
In the year 2025, in a totalitarian United States amid a catastrophic economic and societal collapse, the top-rated TV show is a vicious, real-life game of cat and mouse. Contestants called Runners must outrun “professional assassin[s]” called Hunters, all while they’re stalked by a ratings-hungry national audience.
Ben Richards is a blue-collar worker and husband with a gravely ill child living in “Co-Op City” when he’s blacklisted and becomes jobless. In a last-ditch attempt to save his family, he agrees to become a contestant on The Running Man to win the top prize. Declared an enemy of the state, he’s given 12 hours’ head start on the Hunters. Then the blood sport begins.
The premise is simple: survive for 30 days and the Runner wins $1 billion. No one’s ever come close—the current record is 197 hours—but players can cash in every day they’re on the run. Killing Hunters is also worth money. It’s not a lot, and the financial incentives are mostly theoretical (the game is usually people’s last resort), but it’s an incentive, and in that respect at least, The Running Man is fair.
On the surface, Ben Richards has a surprisingly good run. But for those familiar with King’s work, it’s a sign that things probably won’t have a happy ending.
1987’s Running Man, while it followed the basic framework of a televised battle royale, was very different from King’s book. It veered hard into the sci-fi action side of things and embraced the big-budget tones of late ‘80s Hollywood. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Ben Richards was more heroic anti-hero than downtrodden loser, more than a little different from King’s description of his hero as “scrawny, pre-tubercular.” It was louder, gaudier, and more fun than its source material—full of chrome and eye candy and rife with 80s-style nostalgia—but it was also nowhere near as grim, biting, or affecting as the book.
The Edgar Wright film, on the other hand, has the potential to walk the line. The British filmmaker, best known for movies like Shaun of the Dead, Baby Driver, and Last Night in Soho, first expressed interest in the property in 2017, and Paramount greenlit the project in 2021, with Wright joined by co-writer Michael Bacall.
Wright’s past work suggests he’ll bring the action and the satire. For King fans, the question is whether Wright will double down on the downbeat tone. The recently released trailer offers some early evidence that the new movie will do neither. Wright’s The Running Man keeps the action loud and visceral, but it’s infused with the weary, low-fi grit that has become Wright’s trademark.
In the movie, Glen Powell stars as Ben Richards, a far cry from his dashing Stranger Things golden boy roles. Josh Brolin plays Dan Killian, the slick producer of the show and the man who manipulates Ben into signing up as a contestant. Richards is a runaway success at first, and as the game goes on and he wins audience support, he becomes both a fan favorite and a menace to the state.
The cast also includes Lee Pace as Evan McCone, a veteran Hunter and the primary professional assassin hunting Ben; Jayme Lawson as Ben’s wife, Sheila; Colman Domingo as Bobby Thompson, the host of the game show; and Michael Cera in an interesting twist as a character called Bradley Throckmorton. In supporting roles, we can also see William H. Macy, David Zayas, Emilia Jones, Karl Glusman, Katy O’Brian, and Daniel Ezra.
Fate of King’s Stark, Bleak Ending Unknown
It’s impossible to know whether Wright and Bacall will stay true to the book’s ending. But as the trailer shows, it’s unlikely Wright and co. Will be shy about the darker, bleaker themes of poverty, desperation, media exploitation, and desensitization to violence that help make King’s original so remarkable.
This isn’t the only Stephen King or Richard Bachman story about state violence and media desensitization that Wright and Co. are bringing to the screen. Another Bachman work, 1979’s The Long Walk, is also being adapted into a movie for release in 2025. That one, a dystopian, Kafkaesque competition film, is set for release on September 12. Two months later, on November 7, The Running Man will be released into the world, Bachman style.
The combination of The Running Man and The Long Walk is likely to be big for King fans, but both stories come with plenty of unsettling reflections on entertainment, violence, capital, and empathy.
