Welcome to October, Stephen King fans! This, of course, is the spookiest month of the year, and it’s thus a favorite time for Constant Readers: the ideal 31-day period to marathon every horrific King movie and perhaps induce nightmares by reading books like Pet Sematary or Revival before bed. As far as new adaptations go, the next one set to arrive is IT: Welcome To Derry, which will be premiering on HBO on October 26 – but for this week’s edition of The King Beat, we’re going to be skipping ahead a bit and talking about the last King blockbuster of 2025: Edgar Wright’s The Running Man.
The lead story for this column concerns alterations that are being made to the third act of the Glen Powell-led remake, but it’s not the only headline out of the world of Stephen King, as we also have the director of the new movie Good Boy sharing his own King-centric career aspirations and a fresh look into the making of Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk. There is a whole lot to discuss, so let’s dig in!
Edgar Wright Prepares Stephen King Fans For A Changed Ending In His Running Man Adaptation – Noting It Got The Stamp Of Approval From King Himself
As soon as it was announced that Edgar Wright was developing a new adaptation of Stephen King’s The Running Man, I was struck with two thoughts. The first was that the project felt overdue, as while the book is fantastic and one of the author’s best early works, the previous film version starring Arnold Schwarzenegger bares almost no resemblance to the text. My second thought was, “There is absolutely no way that they stay faithful to the ending.”
In recent months, I’ve had a bit of a change of heart in regard to the latter, as I would really love to see the blockbuster go for the bold, dark ending that is in the source material… but apparently it’s definitely not happening. Wright has confirmed that a new ending has been crafted for his take on The Running Man – and he has admitted that getting the choices approved by Stephen King was an anxiety-ridden experience.
Starring Glen Powell, Josh Brolin, Colman Domingo, and Lee Pace, The Running Man won’t be arriving in theaters until November 14, but a spoiler-free preview of the upcoming Stephen King movie’s ending has been published by the UK magazine Film Stories. In an interview, Edgar Wright admits that doing a straight adaptation of the book’s conclusion was never really on the table, and that one of the most panicked days of the whole experience making the feature was sending King the script that he co-wrote with Michael Bacall including said ending. Explained the filmmaker,
Possibly the most nerve-wracking day of the entire production was writing to King with an attachment of the screenplay and pressing send. Everybody knew at the outset that [the novel’s ending] wasn’t going to be part of this adaptation exactly the [sic] way.
For those of you who haven’t read Stephen King’s The Running Man and don’t really know what I’m talking about here, I’ll just bluntly spell it out: the end of the story features the protagonist getting revenge on the main villain by hijacking an airplane and flying it into a skyscraper. People have noted the disturbing similarities between the novel’s conclusion and the horrific events that transpired on September 11, 2001, and it seems that Edgar Wright and Michael Bacall made the call to avoid that minefield entirely.
In addition to the filmmakers knowing that they weren’t going to adapt the ending of the book, Stephen King apparently knew as well, so he was prepared to digest an original conclusion to the tale of a dystopian game show where a contestant is hunted by a team of killers and has to try and survive out in the world for as long as they can. Fortunately, the anxiety that Edgar Wright felt was eased when he got a positive response from King about his work:
He realised even before he read it that we weren’t going to be doing the ending from the book. And when [King] emailed back, he said, ‘I was very curious how you were going to tackle the ending, and I think you did a great job.’ So I was very happy with that.
We now have just about a month-and-a-half of waiting left to see before we get to see the ending ourselves – and you can be sure that we’ll be writing plenty more about The Running Man between now and the film’s mid-November release.
Of Course, The Director Of New Dog Horror Flick Good Boy Would Be Interested In Stephen King’s Famous Dog Adaptation Cujo
Back in March, Stephen King fans everywhere were delivered some amazing bombshell news: shortly after it was announced that Netflix was developing a new adaptation of Cujo, there was an update from the trades saying that Darren Aronofsky was being tapped to helm the project. That was an exciting development to learn, as Aronofsky is one of the elite filmmakers working today – but if his vision for the project ends up falling through, there is another director who would like to throw his hat into the right: Ben Leonberg.
For those who don’t know the name, Leonberg has earned great acclaim in recent months for his feature directorial debut Good Boy, which is a new horror film that features the filmmaker’s dog, Indy, as its protagonist. Clearly he loves his canine companion, but he is also a major Stephen King fan, and when he was recently asked by CinemaBlend’s Sarah El-Mahmoud about taking on an adaptation, Cujo was the first title that he name-dropped:
Oh, man. I mean, I think the obvious answer –and I think someone else is already working on it – is Cujo. I’m a huge fan of dog storytelling, obviously.
When it comes to dog storytelling, it doesn’t really get much better than Cujo. But if Darren Aronofsky does end up making his movie for Netflix, Leonberg has other ideas as well.
While the filmmaker didn’t specifically name any other titles in the recent interview, he did note that his introduction to Stephen King came via the author’s many collections of novellas and short stories. A great number of those have been used as source material for movies (Creepshow, Cat’s Eye, Children Of The Corn, Maximum Overdrive, Graveyard Shift, and The Shawshank Redemption, to name a few), but there are plenty that haven’t been adapted yet, and Leonberg would love the chance to bring something new to the screen:
I’m a great lover of a lot of his early… it’s certainly how I came to him first, is some of his early collections of short stories. Some of that stuff isn’t adapted. And I think some of my favorite Stephen King adaptations come from short stories or novellas where they can take the idea [and run with it].
Leonberg added that he sees Stephen King as a master of the “what if” scenario (“What if a teenage girl had psychic powers? What if an alcoholic father and his family were trapped in a haunted hotel?”), and he thinks there are a number of short stories waiting to be properly explored:
Some of those early short stories have incredible ‘what ifs’ that are kind still unmined because they’re not as well-known as the novels. But yeah, the number of ideas, it’s an absolute font from Stephen King.
Following its world premiere earlier this year at the SXSW Film Festival, Good Boy arrives in theaters this Friday, October 3.
The Long Walk Featurette Dives Into The Origins Of How The New Adaptation Got Made
Lastly in this week’s column, I’ll leave you with this new featurette from Lionsgate that digs into the making of The Long Walk. This probably won’t surprise you at all to learn, but I am a total nerd, and I’m always interested to learn about all of the various calls and decisions that go into the making of a movie. The Long Walk is a special case in this regard, as it was long considered a book to be unadaptable, and a collection of very talented filmmakers tried and failed to bring the novel to the big screen before director Francis Lawrence, screenwriter JT Mollner, and producer Roy Lee found a way.
This new video doesn’t dig into the full history of The Long Walk in Hollywood (for example, there is no mention of the efforts made by George A. Romero, nor does Frank Darabont get a shoutout), but it does address that Francis Lawrence’s path to making the horror film was a winding one that began with disappointment. Previous visions saw their forward progress killed by a big “no,” but Lawrence eventually saw his “no” turn into a yes – and now, the final product of his work is playing in theaters everywhere.
That wraps up this week’s edition of The King Beat, but as always, I’ll be back here on CinemaBlend next Thursday with a new column examining all of the biggest stories in the world of Stephen King.