A struggling father secures a future for his family by risking his life in a deadly televised game show in The Running Man, premiering in Prague and cinemas worldwide this weekend. This slick new adaptation of the Stephen King novel (written under the Richard Bachmann pseudonym) lacks the campy thrills of the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger version, but is far more faithful to the original source, and succeeds as a bitter satire of corporate media more relevant now than when King wrote it in 1982.
2025’s The Running Man stars Glen Powell as Ben Richards, the role previously filled by Schwarzenegger, a blue-collar worker who has been fired from his latest job after collaborating with a labor union and revealing deadly workplace hazards. Powell makes for an engagingly charismatic action star, but he’s almost too likable for this character, who is supposed to be seething with rage from the outset but appears more playfully miffed; Powell’s Top Gun Maverick costar Miles Teller might have been a better fit.
Richards’ two-year-old daughter Cathy is sick with the flu, and wife Sheila (Jayme Lawson) isn’t making enough as a waitress to afford the potentially life-saving medicine she needs. Seeing people make some fast cash on TV game shows, Richards decides to head down to The Network for casting—though he promises his wife he won’t try out for The Running Man, in which contestants are hunted down by mercenaries over the course of 30 days—and no one has ever made it out alive.
Of course, The Running Man is exactly what Network exec Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) gets Richards to sign up for, sensing his unbridled anger will make for some great reality Free-vee. And even if Richards can’t make it the full 30 days to win the grand prize of one billion ‘new dollars’ (subtle hint that the old monetary system has collapsed), if he survives a week he’ll earn enough to buy his family out of poverty.
Like the recent King adaptation The Long Walk, The Running Man runs with the author’s original rules of the game to great effect: three contestants (characters played by Katy O’Brian and Martin Herlihy join Powell’s Richards) are released into the city, and must survive for as long as they can while being hunted by both the show’s mercenary hunters and the general public, who get cash rewards for ratting them out. To prevent them from hiding out the whole time, they must mail in a recorded message every day, giving hunters a heads up on their potential location.
Ben gets a fake ID and weapons from friend Molie Jernigan (William H. Macy), and later some assistance from anti-establishment (and anti-Network) rebels Bradley Throckmorton (Daniel Ezra) and Elton Parrakis (Michael Cera). But as he travels to Boston and Derry, he finds that the hunters are always on his tail, and ultimately kidnaps civilian Amelia Williams (Emilia Jones) in order to deal with them.
Unlike The Long Walk, we get a growing sense that everything here is rigged—Richards’ tell-all messages are replaced by deepfakes for the public, who are misled by The Network at every turn as a compelling narrative is written on the fly—and everything is predetermined; this game, in other words, cannot be won. Rather than fully investing in the outcome and rooting for Richards’ survival, a certain sense of hopelessness sets in; this accurately represents the tone of King’s novel, but we also get the sense that the movie will deviate from his bleak ending.
Colman Domingo is a lot of fun as Bobby T, the game show host who narrates much of the movie, but one can’t help but feel producers missed a beat by not casting Family Feud host Steve Harvey in the role; Richard Dawson, the original host of Family Feud, absolutely stole the original Running Man away from Schwarzenegger. And while it’s more faithful to the book—and more relevant to modern ICE tactics—the largely anonymous hunters here leave one yearning for the colorful American Gladiators-style hunters in the earlier film. Lee Pace and Karl Glusman bring some life to their antagonists, but they have precious little to work with.
The Running Man was directed and co-written by Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), and represents his first big Hollywood blockbuster after leaving Ant-Man in pre-production. While his style is most certainly watered down here, the director has a great command of spatial awareness, and action scenes set in a YMCA-like facility and Elton’s hideout are carefully staged and blocked to give the audience a great sense of screen geography. But the filmmaker is at his very best injecting the film with an ironic sense of humor, which seems to come from the 1987 movie more than King’s novel; scenes featuring a Kardashian-like reality series called The Americanos are especially amusing.
The film slides into Idiocracy-level satire at times, with a knowing wink that the original novel was set in 2025—and the film makes little attempt to change that, despite a certain Cyberpunk 2077 feel to some of the cityscapes. Wright cannily blends implausibly fake product placement (Fun Twinks breakfast cereal) with real-life variants, including a shout out to Liquid Death (‘murder your thirst!’) that unfamiliar audiences might assume is a reference to the Brawndo The Thirst Mutilator in Mike Judge’s classic rather than a real-life product.
One negative: in line with recent trends, cinematography by Chung-hoon Chung (Wonka) is dim, flat, and murky, even in IMAX; characters are frequently underlit, and we sometimes struggle to find a point of focus in the 2.35:1 scope frame. This is Wright’s first fully-digital film, and while he previously collaborated with Chung on Last Night in Soho, this much bigger-budgeted outing just doesn’t look as good.
While this new update doesn’t pack the bombastic punch or colorful absurdity of its 1987 counterpart, it delivers something sharper and more unsettling—a vision of corporate entertainment as both spectacle and social control. This is The Running Man we deserve for 2025: slick, cynical, and disturbingly plausible.
