- calendar_today August 19, 2025
New Running Man Trailer Highlights High Stakes and Dark Satire
Paramount Pictures has released the first trailer for Edgar Wright’s The Running Man (2025), a new version of the Stephen King-penned dystopian action story of the same name, initially released as a novel under King’s Richard Bachman pseudonym back in 1982. It will likely surprise no one familiar with both King’s book and Wright’s filmography to find that the new film is shaping up to be quite a bit closer in tone to the author’s original work than the Arnold Schwarzenegger-starring action film of the same name that was released in 1987.
King first took on the Bachman pseudonym in 1977 for his novel, The Long Walk, to see if he could replicate his immediate success as a writer, now that he was making a full-time living with his fiction. (King published five books under the Bachman name, but was outed in 1984.) The Running Man, which King also wrote in just a week, was one of the more lasting of the Bachman-era novels. In the book, the United States of America, now a third-world totalitarian nation, is in the year 2025. (Coincidentally, the same year this new film is set to be released.) The country’s most watched television show by far is The Running Man, an actual game show in which a fugitive and a cadre of professional killers called Hunters battle it out for the nation’s voyeuristic viewership.
The story follows Ben Richards, a low-level “Co-Op City” resident, husband, and father to a terminally ill child, who has recently been blacklisted and stripped of work by the government. He decides, on a whim, to “sign up” for The Running Man, hoping to win the show’s large pot and take his family on one last vacation. The basic rules of the game are simple: Live for 30 days and win. Each Runner (contestant) is an out-and-out enemy of the state with a bounty on their head. They are then chased across the country, on public streets, by Hunters, who are being guided by GPS coordinates and a team of snipers who call the shots from a control center.
Surviving 30 days will win the contestant $1 billion, but that has never happened. The record for the longest surviving contestant before the events of the story is 197 hours. Players, however, are given a cash prize each day they survive, and eliminated Hunters have their cash value added to the pot, creating a perverse, but life-or-death incentive for contestants to try and bring down Hunters along the way. Ben does exceptionally well for his first 30 hours, even becoming a fan favorite, but as any King fan knows, these stories rarely, if ever, end on a happy note.
The 1987 film adaptation of The Running Man, directed by Paul Michael Glaser and starring Schwarzenegger, stayed largely true to the source material’s premise, but diverged in a few key ways. The movie is more a sci-fi action blockbuster than a grungy dystopian thriller. Ben Richards was a much less sympathetic protagonist and was a full-on action star to match the times. The film is louder and more over-the-top than the source material, with a great deal of action and very little of the original’s quiet, desperate desperation, much less of the hopeless satire of 1980s consumer capitalism.
Edgar Wright, the creator and director of Shaun of the Dead, Baby Driver, and Last Night in Soho, has been attached to helm the project since he initially expressed interest in doing so back in 2017. In 2021, Paramount greenlit The Running Man, with Wright in the director’s chair and Michael Bacall making up the writing and producing team. They have expressed interest in returning to some of the key thematic elements of King’s original text while crafting their new version of The Running Man to bring to life.
The new trailer reflects this almost perfectly. Glen Powell plays the part of Ben Richards. Powell, who also stars in Netflix’s The Holdovers, is best known for his roles in recent “corny summer movie” hits (he and the Bachman book share that descriptor) like Sunshine Daydream and Twisters. Josh Brolin, in the role of Dan Killian, manipulates Ben into signing up with a promise of immunity and a full salary for the duration of the game.
2025 Is Bachman-Age Stephen King’s Year
The Running Man will not be the only Bachman-era King book being adapted in 2025. A The Long Walk film is also in the works, and set for a September 12, 2025, release, just two months before The Running Man’s November 7 release. In The Long Walk, an event called “The Long Walk” was created by the government as a competition. The rule is that contestants must keep their walking pace above 4 miles per hour. If they go below that for any reason, they get a warning. Three warnings, and you die. The story follows several participants during a version of this game running for three months.
As they both concern the government’s cynical use of entertainment to distract and numb its people, and the lengths they will go to escape their situation, The Running Man and The Long Walk play like mirror images of each other in terms of subject. As such, 2025 will certainly be a big year for fans of both Stephen King and a grim, anxiety-inducing one for the rest of us.
