First Glimpse of Edgar Wright’s The Running Man (2025)

Paramount Pictures has just released the first trailer for The Running Man (2025), Edgar Wright’s upcoming film based on Stephen King’s 1982 dystopian thriller. King originally published The Running Man under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1982. The 2025 movie is a new adaptation, distinct from the 1987 film of the same name starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, which mixed elements of the book with a pure-action, straight-to-the-future blockbuster aesthetic. The Running Man (2025) is shaping up to be a grittier, more violent, and overall more faithful adaptation.

Stephen King published several novels as Richard Bachman in the late 1970s and early 1980s before his true identity was exposed in 1984. The Running Man was one of the longest-lived of the “Bachman books,” with many publishers refusing to print the novel a second time after King’s pseudonym was revealed. He allegedly wrote the book in one week, a testament to how rattled and horrified he was by the Ronald Reagan presidency. The setting is a decaying and authoritarian United States in the year 2025. While much of the book’s commentary on society in 1982 is obsolete or overly familiar, its vision of a nation consumed by mindless reality television is all too on-the-nose.

Ben Richards is the blue-collar protagonist of the novel. He lives in a “Co-Op City” housing project with his wife and dying daughter, his family picture-perfect except for the grim cloud of his wife’s alcoholism. Ben’s a free man without an occupation, a blacklisted man who can’t work for making headlines for the wrong reasons. When the opportunity comes for him to make some money and be on television, he takes a desperate gamble and signs up to be the star contestant on The Running Man, the most-watched television program in America.

Runners like Ben are placed on city streets as paid assassins called Hunters stalk them, their whereabouts revealed by drones and surveillance cameras. Citizens watch as Ben and his fellow contestants are hunted and killed, rooting for their favorite contenders to survive one more day. Ben is promptly deemed an enemy of the state, tried, and sentenced to be killed in the show by the totalitarian regime. He is given a 12-hour head start and sent into the game to face a deadly death match with professional killers.

The show’s rules are simple: survive 30 days and you win a billion dollars. No one has ever even made it to 30 hours on the show; the longest any Runner has ever lasted was 197 hours. But if a Runner can make it through each day, they get a cash prize for each 24-hour period they survive. Players are also given a small amount of money for killing Hunters and more for “saving their lives.” As grim as the setup is, the book posits a few small but compelling incentives for the Hunters and Runners to keep playing.

Ben Richards is no natural at games, a far cry from the hulking physical specimen that Schwarzenegger was in his film adaptation. King describes Ben as “scrawny,” “undernourished,” “five-nine and 135 pounds,” and “pre-tubercular.” But Ben surprises himself and the show’s producers with his skill and tenacity. He lasts longer than anyone else in the history of the game and becomes an audience favorite, turning The Running Man from a glorified execution into a rallying point for popular resistance against the government.

Things don’t end well, as King fans have come to expect. But the twists and turns of the book, and how Ben Richard’s resilience and cunning force those around him to confront what they’re doing, are rich material for an adaptation that can mine the same energy as the book.

The Running Man will star Glen Powell as Ben Richards, whose career arc has shifted from charming but underused leading man to gritty everyman over the last few years. Josh Brolin plays Dan Killian, the host of The Running Man, who coaxes Richards into signing up for the show with seductive promises. Ben starts to gain a following with the audience when he accepts Dan’s challenges and comes out ahead, but when a Runner becomes a favorite of the viewers, he quickly becomes both a new idol and an enemy of the state.

The cast also features Lee Pace as Evan McCone, the show’s lead Hunter; Jayme Lawson as Ben’s wife, Sheila; Colman Domingo as the game show host Bobby Thompson; and Michael Cera as a surprise character called Bradley Throckmorton, whose casting is one of the trailer’s many mysteries. William H. Macy, David Zayas, Emilia Jones, Karl Glusman, Katy O’Brian, and Daniel Ezra play other, smaller roles in the film.

King’s The Long Walk, another story he originally published under the Bachman pseudonym in 1979, has also been developed as a film. That movie, starring Jarin Gould, is also set to release in 2025, on September 12. The Running Man will follow on November 7. A second feature is just the start of what’s in store for Bachman fans; a TV series set in King’s most famous dystopian universe, The Dark Tower, is also expected to make its way to screens in 2025. Stay tuned for the exciting, potentially horrifying news about government brutality, media manipulation, and the value of human life as King’s grim science fiction becomes contemporary entertainment.