{"id":979888,"date":"2025-10-09T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/?p=979888"},"modified":"2025-10-09T14:51:22","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T18:51:22","slug":"the-running-man-edgar-wright-glen-powell-stephen-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/movies\/the-running-man-edgar-wright-glen-powell-stephen-king\/","title":{"rendered":"The Running Man: Edgar Wright and Glen Powell Talk Stephen King Dystopia in 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"is-style-spoiler-alert\"><svg class=\"icon\" aria-hidden=\"true\" focusable=\"false\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" viewBox=\"0 0 32 23\"><path d=\"M15.713 6.511c-2.41 0-4.376 2.057-4.376 4.591 0 2.527 1.96 4.591 4.376 4.591 2.41 0 4.375-2.057 4.375-4.591 0-2.527-1.966-4.591-4.375-4.591z\"\/><path d=\"M15.713 18.358c-3.88 0-7.04-3.253-7.04-7.256s3.16-7.255 7.04-7.255c3.879 0 7.04 3.252 7.04 7.255s-3.161 7.256-7.04 7.256zm16.085-7.961C27.63 3.709 22.015.027 16 .027 9.985.026 4.369 3.708.202 10.396c-.267.43-.267.98 0 1.41C4.37 18.495 9.985 22.178 16 22.178c6.015 0 11.624-3.683 15.798-10.37.267-.432.267-.98 0-1.411z\"\/><\/svg><em>This article appears in the new issue of<strong>&nbsp;<\/strong>DEN OF GEEK&nbsp;magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/magazine\/\">here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/edgar-wright\/\">Edgar Wright<\/a>, the filmmaker and genre specialist who has given the world modern gems like <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/movies\/shaun-of-the-dead-defined-the-modern-nerd-movie-for-better-and-worse\/\">Shaun of the Dead<\/a><\/em>, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/movies\/hot-fuzz-is-the-best-movie-in-the-cornetto-trilogy\/\">Hot Fuzz<\/a><\/em>, and <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/movies\/baby-driver-review-2\/\">Baby Driver<\/a><\/em>, estimates he was around 13 years old when he read \u201cthe Bachman Books,\u201d a collection of four novels that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/stephen-king\/\">Stephen King<\/a> published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman during the early years of his career. Among those books was <em>The Running Man<\/em>, a dystopian thriller set in an economically ruined 2025. There a totalitarian U.S. government keeps the public distracted by constantly broadcasting a deadly TV game show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI read <em>The Running Man<\/em> and was really bowled over by it,\u201d Wright tells us during a break between sessions in the post-production of his own 2025 <em>Running Man<\/em>. \u201cI had actually read the book before I saw the 1987 film. So even though I enjoyed the film, I was very aware that it was radically different from the book, and it\u2019s probably the first time as both an avid reader and a film fan that I was really aware of how different an adaptation could be.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\t\r\n\n\t\t<div class=\"ad-dog__cnx-container\"><script id=\"0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796\">\n\t\t\tcnx.cmd.push(function() {\n\t\t\t\tcnx({\n\t\t\t\t\tplayerId: \"106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530\",\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t}).render(\"0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796\");\n\t\t\t});\n\t\t<\/script><\/div>\n\t\n\n\n<p>The movie that Wright is referring to, 1987\u2019s <em>The Running Man<\/em>, was very loosely inspired by King\u2019s novel and starred Arnold Schwarzenegger. For his modern retelling, Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall have gone back to King\u2019s source text, in which an unemployed construction worker named Ben Richards, desperate to find money for his family and medicine for his gravely ill daughter, volunteers to participate in the title game&#8212;a competition in which the \u201crunner\u201d must stay alive for 30 days while pursued anywhere in the world by government assassins known as Hunters. If Richards makes it to the end of the month, he\u2019ll win a grand prize of $1 billion. If not, he\u2019ll die trying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Wright is keen for the audience\u2014whether it\u2019s King devotees, fans of the first film, or just casual moviegoers\u2014to know that his <em>Running Man<\/em> is not a remake of the 1987 cult classic, even as he hints they pay homage to the Schwarzenegger film in a couple of spots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s clear, having done test screenings, that there are people who have neither read the book nor seen the 1987 film,\u201d Wright says. \u201cBut when it first came to me, I wasn\u2019t interested in doing a remake of the film because there wasn\u2019t any sort of reason to do that. I think the reason to remake a film is if there&#8217;s something else in the material. So it was never going to be a scene-for-scene literal remake. It was always, in our heads, a new adaptation of the source material.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-meet-the-running-man\"><strong>Meet The Running Man<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>This century\u2019s Ben Richards is played by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/glen-powell\/\">Glen Powell<\/a>, the throwback movie star of such recent hits as <em>Anyone But You<\/em>, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/movies\/hit-man-review-watch-glen-powell-movie-stardom\/\">Hit Man<\/a><\/em>, and <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/movies\/twisters-review-a-90s-throwback\/\">Twisters<\/a><\/em>. His natural charisma and everyman demeanor make him perfect to play the working-class, yet aggrieved, hero of King\u2019s novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThe important thing with Ben Richards is not that he isn\u2019t tough,\u201d Wright explains. \u201cHe\u2019s an out-of-work construction worker, and we make it clear in the movie that he\u2019s worked some of the toughest, shittiest jobs and worked outside a lot. So he\u2019s capable, but he\u2019s still not John Wick. He\u2019s not a superhero. He\u2019s a dad, and he\u2019s kind of flying by the seat of his pants in the show. He\u2019s on his heels for a lot of the movie, and I thought Glen was just perfect for that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For Powell\u2019s part, it was a veritable bucket list dream to work with the director of <em>Scott Pilgrim vs. the World<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cHe\u2019s been one of my favorite filmmakers,\u201d Powell says when we catch up with him on the road. \u201cI made a list when I first moved out to Los Angeles, the guys that I would just kill to work with, and Edgar Wright was at the top of that list.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A few years back, Wright began following Powell on X, and the two eventually met for lunch in London. But it was after a second lunch in Los Angeles that the seeds for collaborating on <em>The Running Man<\/em> were sown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI ended up running into the heads of Paramount at that same restaurant,\u201d Powell recalls. \u201cAnd they said, \u2018What do you want to do? Who do you want to work with?\u2019 And I said, \u2018I was just hanging with Edgar Wright, and I would kill to work with him.\u2019 And they\u2019re like, \u2018Are you being serious? Do you know about <em>The Running Man<\/em>? He\u2019s putting that together, so that very much could be a thing,\u2019 and I was like \u2018very cool, that&#8217;s great.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Powell says that Wright had been considering a few different actors for the role at the time but had not yet made up his mind when the <em>Top Gun: Maverick<\/em> breakout decided to give the filmmaker a little nudge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI got down to the wire and sent him a really nice text just telling him why, if he hired me, there\u2019d be no other actor that would ever work as hard and put his body on the line more than I would,\u201d Powell says. \u201cI meant it. So he took a shot on me and hired me for this movie.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Powell, while certainly sturdily built, is not exactly a Schwarzenegger\u2014but Schwarzenegger was not exactly a Ben Richards either, who is described in the book as \u201cscrawny\u201d and ravaged by deprivation and poverty by the time he enrolls in the game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cBen Richards is a guy who has a very short fuse and is engaged with the world and everything that\u2019s happening with it on that short fuse,\u201d says Powell. \u201cHe\u2019s a bit of an angry guy, and they\u2019re looking at him like, \u2018This guy has a short temper and is angry with the world, therefore we can kind of take advantage of him and his situation and make sure that we get viewers riled up.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But Powell notes that his character, as in the book, begins to realize that while he\u2019s initially playing the game for the sake of his family, his ability to stay alive also begins to awaken a downtrodden and submissive public from its stupor. \u201cHis daughter\u2019s very sick, potentially days away from dying, and he\u2019s put in a position in which he will do anything to save his daughter\u2019s life. So he\u2019s a guy who\u2019s trying to protect his own and then realizes that his situation is not unique, that everybody is struggling to make ends meet and protect their own, and that by winning this game, by surviving, he can be a symbol and a beacon of change\u2014not just for his daughter\u2019s future, but everybody\u2019s future.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-a-world-just-a-few-steps-from-ours\"><strong>A World Just A Few Steps From Ours<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Like <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/movies\/the-long-walk-review-stephen-king-done-justice\/\">The Long Walk<\/a><\/em>, another recently released film adapted from a King\/Bachman tale of dystopia, <em>The Running Man<\/em> feels eerily prescient for modern times. They both adapt novels that predicted TV dominating pop culture decades before the fact, the economic gap between the haves and the have-nots widening, and authoritarianism taking hold in the United States. Wright furthermore notes that both films will hopefully complement each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Even since we shot the movie, it has become more and more timely,\u201d Powell says. \u201cIt is unbelievable how Stephen King saw the future of 2025, the year that we are in right now, and how eerie it is to see where we are living and what it looks like, and how similar it is to all the events that are happening in this book. This movie is obviously just cinematic escapism, and it\u2019s fun and people are going to absolutely see it as just a blast of a movie experience, but what is incredibly fun is watching Stephen King the clairvoyant, and how we get to portray that, because it comments on a lot of things happening in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Wright concurs with Powell\u2019s remarks, pointing out the film has a satirical edge to it, even if it\u2019s not an out-and-out comedy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWhat\u2019s crazy about the book is that it\u2019s a pretty chilling prediction of where we\u2019re at,\u201d he muses. \u201cAnd that in itself is quite disturbing, that things are presented in a very kind of blunt way. I\u2019m really happy with how it works in the movie because it doesn\u2019t seem so fanciful, and that\u2019s what&#8217;s disturbing about it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One aspect of King\u2019s book that Wright finds especially interesting is how the author seemed to predict the pervasive growth of reality television and the extreme behavior certain strains of it have engendered over the years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThere has obviously been reality TV or forms of it going back to when the book was written,\u201d the director says, \u201cbut I think since the book was written, there is so much TV that has swam in the same waters. And I think, also, people now are much more aware of how a TV show gets made and how manipulative reality TV is, and also how many lives are ruined in the process. Whether it\u2019s Jerry Springer or Sally Jesse Raphael, or even&nbsp; <em>American Idol<\/em> or <em>X Factor,<\/em> or those other shows, they play fast and loose with the contestants\u2019 lives and mental health. There have been lots of stories like that that bring the book into chilling relief.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In keeping with the quasi-realistic nature of those aspects of the book, the world of <em>The Running Man<\/em>, while set ostensibly in 2025, is positioned a few minutes into the future and just to the left of the real world in terms of its technology and culture\u2014albeit, Wright notes, the film also taps into current trends that find people going back to analog technology in some ways. Curiously, Wright also admits that he had forgotten the novel was set in 2025 until this project came along.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI realized, \u2018Oh, a film set in 2025 is going to come out in 2025, that&#8217;s sort of wild,\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cWe don\u2019t say in the film what year it\u2019s set in. What, hopefully, will be clear to viewers is that we\u2019re in like an alternate 2025\u2026 There\u2019s not much technology in the movie that doesn\u2019t exist in some form now, but I think what tends to happen is that there is new technology out there that\u2019s pretty advanced, but then it seems to fail when it gets to a consumer level. So our basic idea was that in the upper-class world, technological advancements have gotten better, and everywhere else, everything else has gotten worse.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-stephen-king-still-running\"><strong>Stephen King: Still Running<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>One thing that seems timeless is the work of Stephen King himself. Following <em>The Monkey<\/em>, <em>The Life of Chuck<\/em>, and <em>The Long Walk<\/em>, <em>The Running Man<\/em> is the fourth feature film based on a King story or novel to come out in 2025. Although <em>The Running Man <\/em>was published in 1982, King actually wrote it a decade earlier, two years before his first novel <em>Carrie <\/em>was published, at a time when he and his wife Tabitha were still struggling to make ends meet while they and their kids were living in a trailer in Maine. King has famously said that he wrote <em>The Running Man<\/em> in a single week, blasting through the novel and perhaps projecting his anxieties\u2014a fear that he could not provide for his wife and children, that he would be a failure\u2014onto Ben Richards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWhat\u2019s really special about <em>The Running Man<\/em> is that it was [written] at a very specific moment in Stephen King\u2019s life,\u201d Powell considers. \u201cA moment in which he was sort of feeling angry and powerless, very much like the underdog that Ben Richards is, and so that voice, that man against the system, really comes out in this book in a way that I think is indicative of where Stephen King was at during that moment in time. But what is so crazy is how timely it feels to everything that\u2019s happening right now. It feels like the ordinary person is trying to do right in the world, and sometimes it can feel really unrewarding, and you can feel powerless and like you don\u2019t know where to look or who to trust. I think a lot of that is in this story.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>The Running Man is in theaters on Nov. 14.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This article appears in the new issue of&nbsp;DEN OF GEEK&nbsp;magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories&nbsp;here. Edgar Wright, the filmmaker and genre specialist who has given the world modern gems like Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and Baby Driver, estimates he was around 13 years old when he read \u201cthe Bachman Books,\u201d [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":980159,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"dog_exclude_from_homepage":false,"dog_do_not_display_featured_image":false,"dog_external_link":"","dog_product_price":0,"dog_product_button_label":"Buy 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See, way back in 2014, back in a time before Top Gun: Maverick or working with Richard Linklater, Powell appeared in The Expendables 3, an old school action flick which starred\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Movies&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Movies","link":"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/movies\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Glen Powell and Arnold Schwarzenegger The Running Man","src":"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Glen-Powell-and-Arnold-Schwarzenegger-The-Running-Man.jpg?fit=1200%2C675&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Glen-Powell-and-Arnold-Schwarzenegger-The-Running-Man.jpg?fit=1200%2C675&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Glen-Powell-and-Arnold-Schwarzenegger-The-Running-Man.jpg?fit=1200%2C675&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Glen-Powell-and-Arnold-Schwarzenegger-The-Running-Man.jpg?fit=1200%2C675&resize=700%2C400 2x, https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Glen-Powell-and-Arnold-Schwarzenegger-The-Running-Man.jpg?fit=1200%2C675&resize=1050%2C600 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":712428,"url":"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/movies\/edgar-wright-bored-endless-talk-of-streaming\/","url_meta":{"origin":979888,"position":1},"title":"Edgar Wright Is Bored With \u2018Endless Oxygen Taken Up By Talk of Streaming\u2019","author":"David Crow","date":"September 17, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Last Night in Soho is finally being released at the end of October. 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