The Running Man (2025): A Darker, Truer Version of King’s Vision

Paramount Pictures has released the first trailer for the upcoming The Running Man (2025), from Edgar Wright. This marks a reboot of Stephen King’s novel of the same name, published in 1982 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Fans who loved King’s novel know that it’s not the same book as the 1987 action movie of the same name starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Running Man had previously been in the hands of competing projects (and directors), but Wright has brought it back to Paramount in recent years.

In 1982, The Running Man was published by a pseudonymous King, using a now-infamous mononym and credited to Richard Bachman. The cover proclaims it a “novel of terror” and details the televised death chases of the book’s star-crossed hero. It was the third novel King released under the Bachman name, coming after the similarly anarchic and dystopian Roadwork and the more disturbing bestseller Rage. The Bachman pen name was a secret known only to King and his editor; when King finally revealed his identity in 1984, his early Bachman releases entered King lore as “the books that broke Stephen King.”

The Running Man novel is a commentary on late-1970s and early-’80s politics (hostile to the left) and media (growing into an all-consuming colossus) that has aged not one bit better, but it retains its influence over the decades. The novel and its sequel, Firestarter, were two of King’s biggest book sales in 1982, and The Running Man was his first theatrical feature adaptation, which has had several incarnations. The now-out-of-copyright novella, published in 1979, was adapted as The Long Walk, a loose adaptation of King’s short story.

The key aspects of the story, which Wright has now and again paid close attention to in previous projects like Hot Fuzz, are its interrogation of media and violence, its character-driven tone, and its social-communist endgame.

The Running Man universe takes place in a fallen, dystopian United States. It’s 2025, and the U.S. has devolved into a repressive totalitarianism called the U.S. of America. Ben Richards (Glen Powell), a resident of “Co-Op City” living with his wife and fatally ill daughter, is blacklisted and down on his luck. After a few too many days of being unable to support his family, he decides to take a slim chance at survival and enter the titular The Running Man. This is a nationwide television game show and the highest-rated show in the United States of America.

The show’s participants are Runners, people who attempt to evade teams of elite assassins (called Hunters) and kill their way to freedom. They are all combat veterans in one way or another, tracked by tele-cams while being fed information about their position and pursued by Hunters via a team of operatives based in a large television studio.

Runners are declared enemies of the state, and they get a 12-hour head start before the Hunters are released. It’s effectively a game of capture-the-flag, and there is one. For a month of eluding and evasion, the winner receives one billion dollars. No one has ever come close to 30 days, though the record is 197 hours. Participants are given credits on a fake social security system to keep them playing (read: alive), and they get a small sum for each Hunter they dispatch, for motivation. Ben does better than anyone has before him, but fans of King’s books know that few of his books end happily.

In the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger version of The Running Man, the producers of the show keep the basic premise (runners, hunted, live on television, die or win a fortune) but blow out the edges with video-game sci-fi gibs, not in small part to make way for Schwarzenegger to perform Arnold Schwarzenegger. In this action movie version of The Running Man, our hero is no longer “scrawny” and “pre-tubercular” as he was in the book; his desperation has been thoroughly beaten out of him.

The 1987 movie has flashes of the bleak social commentary and satire that the book does well, but ultimately prefers to make itself a noisy and nasty watch.

Whether or not Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall remain true to King’s relentlessly dour ending is an open question; the original ending was so grisly, even many King fans hated it. But early indications seem to point to a The Running Man faithful to the original book in many important ways.

Fans of the Bachman books have even more to look forward to than Wright’s The Running Man in the coming year. The Long Walk (1979) is another dystopian runner-up world, from King, getting its film adaptation in 2025. The Long Walk is not an adaptation of The Running Man, but it does offer up its own deadly televised spectacle, where boys fight to the death on a set of commandments designed to force them to stop.

King sold The Long Walk to Castle Rock for adaptation, but has sold the Running Man remake rights several times over his career. The Long Walk is hitting theaters first on September 12, 2025. The Running Man will be in theaters on November 7 of that year.

The new Running Man movie is rated R for violence and bloody language throughout, as well as some drug use and brief sexual content. It opens in theaters on November 7, 2025.