Edgar Wright Brings New Edge to King’s The Running Man

Paramount Pictures has dropped the first trailer for Edgar Wright’s upcoming The Running Man (2025). It is the first new adaptation of Stephen King’s dystopian thriller since the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger action film, though Wright’s version of the book—which King published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1982—is a “fanatically faithful adaptation” of the King source material, according to Deadline.

Published in 1982, The Running Man was one of a series of novels King wrote under the Bachman pseudonym between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, in a now-infamous episode of King fanatics spotting his pattern of four publishing houses and identical linguistic ticks in Bachman’s five books. The public outed the King authorship in 1984, but by then Bachman’s popularity had waned, and The Running Man—which King himself wrote in a week—remains one of the most-read and most-adapted of his Bachman novels.

Set in a totalitarian, economically and morally bankrupt America in 2025—also, by happy coincidence, the year of the new film—The Running Man follows the reality game show of the same name, which dominates television and the airwaves with its parade of “contestants” and “Runners” hunted across the nation by professional assassins called “Hunters.” A national rebel named Ben Richards takes a gamble when he signs up to participate in the show’s premise, a desperate move to feed his family and beat the system that has blacklisted him from legitimate work.

Wright has been developing a film adaptation of The Running Man for over five years now, first mentioning the project in a 2017 Entertainment Weekly interview, and then bringing on writer Michael Bacall for a full-on production when the project was greenlit in 2021. With the film now set to hit theaters on November 7, 2025, the new trailer offers some first looks at Wright and Bacall’s vision for the classic novel.

The film features a very familiar opening: The premise of the game show is, as it was in the book, simple, and simple in its horror. Contestants are “Runners” who must survive for 30 days to win a million dollars. So far, no one has ever even come close; the record holder for longest survival is a laughable 197 hours. But the catch is that the Runner makes money for every day they survive and for every Hunter they kill, and although Ben Richards is more squalor than shoot-outs, his desperation is desperation enough.

Fans of King will remember that, though Richards performs better on the show than anyone in history, it’s not quite the happy ending one might hope to find in 2025’s America. The 1987 film adaptation of The Running Man tried to stay true to the book’s themes, but fell short in terms of the book’s bleakness, character development, and worldbuilding. The film version of Richards was very much Schwarzenegger as Schwarzenegger, strong and tough, instead of King’s original character of a “scrawny” and “pre-tubercular” Richards.

The show and the film are basically the same: A program that lets the public bet on participants in a fight to the death, who themselves sign up for the show as a last-ditch effort to provide for themselves and their families. Where the film differed was in its shift to a more typical Schwarzenegger flick, with a heftier dose of sci-fi, and a heavier focus on the theatrical action flick aesthetics of the late 1980s.

Wright, known for hits like Shaun of the Dead, Baby Driver, and Last Night in Soho, has been attached to the project since 2017 and was greenlit with co-writer Michael Bacall in 2021. Wright’s approach, according to the new trailer, is a far closer approach to King’s original, one that is both similarly concerned with social commentary while remaining action-packed.

Lead role Ben Richards, renamed “Benny” by Dan Killian, a playboy and host of the show, is now played by Glen Powell, currently known for his role in Netflix’s Chris Evans-produced series Our Flag Means Death, but otherwise rapidly diversifying his portfolio with both his role in the recently-released film Twisters and his upcoming lead in Top Gun: Maverick 2. Josh Brolin plays Killian, both showrunner and manipulator, who coerces Ben into signing up, and Lee Pace plays Evan McCone, the lead Hunter assigned to track Richards.

Jayme Lawson plays Richards’s wife, Sheila, and Colman Domingo hosts the game show as Bobby Thompson. Michael Cera plays rebel Bradley Throckmorton. William H. Macy, David Zayas, Emilia Jones, Karl Glusman, Katy O’Brian, and Daniel Ezra play supporting roles.

One of the few deviations from the book’s story that the trailer shows is the depiction of the crowd’s support and Richard’s popularity throughout the filming, which in King’s book is implied but never fleshed out as it is in the trailer. Whether or not Wright and Bacall’s film will choose to follow King’s bleak ending as the book does, however, is not revealed in the trailer.

Fans of King’s Bachman novels have other films on the way as well. In addition to The Running Man, the film adaptation of the King/Bachman book The Long Walk, another dystopian competition survival novel, was written and scheduled to release in 2025, and hit theaters on September 12, just two months before The Running Man on November 7. A somber reminder of King’s themes that resonate today even more strongly, both films could do for 2025 what The Long Walk did for the 2021 industry conversation: help us look back at where entertainment, capitalism, and empathy intersect.