Glen Powell Takes the Lead in Wright’s The Running Man

Paramount Pictures released a new trailer for The Running Man (2025), a 2025 remake of the Stephen King novel written under his pen name, Richard Bachman. The new film is directed by Edgar Wright and is expected to be a much darker and more faithful adaptation of the original book compared to the 1987 action film of the same name.

Stephen King published six novels as Richard Bachman between the late 1970s and 1984, when the ruse was eventually exposed. The Running Man, Bachman’s longest-running title, originally came out in 1982. King wrote the book in one week, and it has been in development for a feature film multiple times since.

Set in 2025 (conveniently, the year this new film will come out), The Running Man takes place in a dystopian United States where a totalitarian government controls the population through both fear and a popular television game show. The show of the same name casts members of the public as contestants, or Runners, who are hunted down and pursued by trained assassins for the viewing pleasure of a captive audience. Contestants who last 30 days win $1 billion. The most any previous contestant has lasted is 197 hours.

Ben Richards is a low-income man who lives in the housing project “Co-Op City” with his wife and young daughter, who is ill and in need of treatment. Blacklisted and jobless, Richards decides to enter the Running Man competition as a last-ditch effort to earn money. As an enemy of the state, he is given a 12-hour head start in the race to survive.

The mechanics of The Running Man are relatively simple. By day, contestants move around the country and try not to get caught by the Hunters, the show’s assassins. By night, they try to evade detection and hide from both the Hunters and government authorities. The Hunters are given no incentive to show mercy, and the contestants are given every reason to want to go live. Each day of survival nets the contestant $50,000 and, more importantly, a bounty on the Hunters’ heads. In the movie, Richards is an underdog who far outperforms expectations, although, as with most King books, it is not expected to end well.

The 1987 film adaptation of the same name had little in common with The Running Man, aside from the basic premise of the title game show. Instead of a violent satire of dystopian totalitarianism and society’s voyeuristic appetite for bloodsport, the action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger changed the location to an unknown future, dressed up Ben Richards in bodybuilder regalia, and added an onslaught of sci-fi gizmos and explosive chases. The movie took place in a vaguely futuristic America, not a modern-day dystopia in the year of the film’s release.

Schwarzenegger’s Richards was no longer a desperate man on his last legs. His Richards was hardly Richards at all: King described him in the novel as “scrawny” and “pre-tubercular,” not the buffed champion Arnold delivered to the screen. The new trailer’s Ben Richards, played by Glen Powell, seems more in line with the book’s original: a scrawny young man without much to lose.

Wright is known for such films as Shaun of the Dead, Baby Driver, and Last Night in Soho. He first expressed interest in The Running Man as a potential film in 2017 and has been attached as director ever since. In 2021, Paramount gave the film a green light and hired Wright to write the screenplay alongside Michael Bacall. It is expected that Wright and Bacall will deliver a more nuanced film, more in keeping with King’s original vision, while still maintaining the thrills.

The new trailer appears to confirm these hopes, with Powell as a desperate and underdog Ben Richards who is forced into the Running Man contest by Josh Brolin’s Dan Killian. Brolin’s Killian is the smarmy host of the show, who manipulates Richards into signing on as the audience is not buying his sob story. As the game progresses and Ben Richards becomes a popular audience favorite, his position as an enemy of the state quickly deteriorates.

Lee Pace stars as Evan McCone, the lead Hunter after Ben Richards. Jayme Lawson is Richard’s wife, Sheila. Colman Domingo plays the titular host of the Running Man show, Bobby Thompson. Another familiar face, Michael Cera, plays a member of the resistance, Bradley Throckmorton. William H. Macy, David Zayas, Emilia Jones, Karl Glusman, Katy O’Brian, and Daniel Ezra round out the cast.

Fans of the Bachman-era Stephen King will have two adaptations to enjoy next year, as The Long Walk, a 1979 Bachman-penned book also about a government-run death match, is also being made into a film next year, arriving in theaters on September 12, 2025. The Running Man opens on November 7, 2025.

Both books were similarly thematically concerned with the corruption of government, the propaganda power of media, and the cost of survival. Both adaptations are sure to make 2025 a heavy one for Stephen King fans and, one can hope, give them something to think about in terms of the toxic intersection of entertainment, capital, and empathy.