New Trailer: Edgar Wright’s Running Man Explores Media Obsession

Paramount Pictures has just released the first trailer for the upcoming The Running Man (2025), directed by Edgar Wright. This latest adaptation is an entirely new take on Stephen King’s dystopian thriller, which was originally published under his pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1982. While an Arnold Schwarzenegger-starring action film was released in 1987, Wright’s upcoming movie is more of a straight shot from the grim, satirical book.

Back in the late 1970s and early ’80s, King began publishing work under the Bachman pseudonym until he was outed by a persistent reporter in 1984. One of the most well-known of those books was The Running Man, which King wrote in a single week. The book is set in 2025, during a time of economic collapse and totalitarian rule in the United States, when an incredibly popular live-action game show is taking over the airwaves.

Ben Richards is a factory worker living in a “Co-Op City” apartment with his wife and terminally ill daughter. Out of work and blacklisted, he becomes desperate enough to enter the nation’s highest-rated show: The Running Man. Runners (contestants) are targeted and hunted down by assassins known as Hunters while the public is allowed to watch their every move on live television. After being publicly identified as an enemy of the state, Richards is given a 12-hour head start on the broadcast. It’s then a matter of survival.

The rules are simple: survive 30 days, and you win $1 billion. In reality, nobody has ever even come close. The longest a contestant has lasted is 197 hours. Players are given an initial cash prize and a bank account in which they are credited each time they stay alive another day. There are also cash bonuses for each Hunter the Runner can kill, so there is an incentive to survive and play that is somewhat more than just emotion or pure desperation. Ben Richards, it turns out, is better at the game than most players, but as King fans will know, things don’t end happily.

The 1987 film adaptation deviated significantly from the novel. It was still a game show with a life-or-death prize, but it’s shifted significantly toward sci-fi action and late ’80s blockbuster camp. Schwarzenegger’s Richards is more pumped-up bodybuilder than the description King gave for his character in the book, which reads “scrawny and not much taller than five-foot-seven. He was a pre-tubercular look.” It also doesn’t have much of the satire and the emotional stakes of the book.

Wright, of course, is the acclaimed director of Shaun of the Dead, Baby Driver, and Last Night in Soho, among other films. He has been attached to direct The Running Man since at least 2017, when he first said he was “all in” on an adaptation of the book. In 2021, Paramount gave the green light to the project with Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall on board. The duo’s script and vision are reportedly closer to the King book than the Schwarzenegger film.

The newly released trailer doesn’t necessarily provide a lot of plot points that haven’t already been known about from the book. But it does seem like the new version will land more on the side of King’s bleaker original than the cheesy movie adaptation. Glen Powell stars as Ben Richards, and we see him shift from his normal go-to charming, smiley self into a much more gritty performance. Josh Brolin plays Dan Killian, the host of the show, who manipulates Ben into joining the game.

Ben’s support is his wife Sheila, played by Jayme Lawson, and Evan McCone, the lead Hunter sent after Ben, played by Lee Pace. Colman Domingo appears onscreen as Bobby Thompson, the host of the game show itself. Other actors in the film include Michael Cera in a twisty turn as Bradley Throckmorton, a rebel character, as well as William H. Macy, David Zayas, Emilia Jones, Karl Glusman, Katy O’Brian, and Daniel Ezra.

It’s unclear if Wright and Bacall will commit to King’s relentlessly bleak ending or attempt to find a more hopeful conclusion for the material. But this trailer and the known plot points hint that this adaptation will not shy away from the more damning themes of desperation, monetization, and the desensitization from the level of violence being served up in entertainment media.

A Busy Year for Bachman Fans

Fans of Stephen King’s Bachman-era writing are not the only ones to get their dystopian fill in 2025, as The Long Walk, another novel written in 1979 about a government competition in which people are not allowed to stop moving, also has a film adaptation set to release that same year. The Long Walk movie has a release date of September 12, 2025, while The Running Man movie will be available two months later on November 7, 2025.

Both films deal heavily with the cost of competing in something terrible, whether it’s real people in an entertainment media war or media institutions competing for ratings in capitalism. Either way, 2025 might be an interesting year to reflect on some of the systems we currently have that walk a fine line between control, exploitation, and compulsion.