When Arnold Schwarzenegger played game show contestant Ben Richards in the 1987 version of Stephen King’s dystopian novel “The Running Man,” his adventures took place in a relatively confined subterranean world. When “Baby Driver” and “Last Night in Soho” director Edgar Wright took on the challenge of reimagining King’s novel for 2025, he decided to go back to the more ambitious scale of the original story — even though it meant taking on the biggest production of his career.
“In the original Stephen King [writing under the pseudonym Richard Bachman] book, the playing field of the game is the world,” Wright told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “Ben Richards leaves the network studio, and he’s got to exist in the world for 30 days. It’s hide and seek on a national, even global scale — there’s nothing in the rules to say you couldn’t get out of the country. The Arnold Schwarzenegger version kept it all contained.”
With that in mind, Wright pitched his “Running Man,” in which Glen Powell plays the game show contestant running for his life, less as a remake than a new adaptation of the novel. “We wanted to do the book, and we wanted to have the same scale as the book,” Wright said, though he acknowledged that after completing the film, he understood why the makers of the 1987 movie went a different way. “Having now done the shoot and been totally exhausted by it, I understand it was a practical decision rather than an artistic one.”
“The Running Man,” which encompassed 165 different locations and sets across England, Scotland, and Bulgaria, may have exhausted Wright, but for the audience it’s more energizing than tiring thanks to the movie’s high style and carefully calibrated pacing. It’s essentially a non-stop chase in the tradition of Sam Peckinpah’s “The Getaway” (adapted by screenwriter Walter Hill from the Jim Thompson novel), and it not only shares that film’s elegant sense of structure and visual dynamism but its approach to the hero.
“ Usually when I make a movie, we watch a good luck film before we start production,” Wright said. “The week before we started shooting, we got together and watched ‘The Getaway,’ because Glen had actually never seen it. It’s a great example of a great movie star performance. [Steve] McQueen had immense power and charisma, not saying very much at all, and you could point to a lot of his performances, but that’s a really great one in terms of how to hold the screen.”
Powell’s version of Richards has a tightly coiled rage reminiscent of McQueen in “The Getaway,” but what really makes the performance work is his vulnerability — the fight scenes are sometimes as clumsy as they are kinetic, giving the viewer the sense that Ben Richards could easily be defeated at any given point. “He’s a tough character, but he’s not John Wick,” Wright said. “He’s not Jason Bourne. He doesn’t have amazing action skills. He’s fallible, and he makes mistakes.”
In addition to McQueen’s Doc McCoy in “The Getaway,” Wright had two other reference points for the characters. “We talked about two performances a lot,” Wright said. “One was Harrison Ford in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ because he’s an adventurer, but he’s not perfect. The key moment is when he says, ‘I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go along.’ Or I think of Ford getting punched in the face and falling like a sack of potatoes. He’s not superhuman.”
The other influence was Bruce Willis’ performance as John McClane in “Die Hard.” “In the first one at least, even though he’s a cop, the exciting thing is that for large portions of the film, he’s out of his depth, and you think there’s no way that he can take on all of these guys and win. What we talked about [in ‘The Running Man’] was the idea that Ben Richards is on his heels the entire time, and there’s something really fun and hopefully exciting about the fact that he’s just trying to tough his way through it.”
Although the scale of “The Running Man” was more elaborate even than big-budget Wright films like “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” the director said he had a safety net in the form of collaborators with whom he had worked many times before. What really made him nervous wasn’t making the movie — it was getting script approval from the book’s author, one of Wright’s childhood heroes.
“[Stephen King] is a producer on the film and had script approval and some cast approval as well,” Wright said. “I had been in contact with him on and off for years, and he’d always been really kind, but when I was working on [the script for ‘The Running Man’], I didn’t talk to him about it until we were very close to it happening, because I didn’t want to be the boy who cried wolf. The idea of getting in touch with him about the script and the film not happening would be heartbreaking to me.”
Once Wright was pretty sure the movie was on its way to a green light, he sent King the script he co-wrote with Michael Bacall and waited for the author’s response. “Stephen King is probably the most famous English teacher in the world, and it was literally having to hand in your homework to Stephen King and over a very long weekend. At one point, he started reviewing it page by page, and my heart couldn’t take it. I was like, ‘Please, just read the whole thing!’”
Luckily, King liked the script, but after some early conversations about casting, he stayed away until the movie was finished. When Wright showed King the film and finally met him in person on a visit to Bangor, Maine, where the author lives, he got the perfect response.
“He said this thing that really stuck with me, and it’s what I hope the audience will take away from it as well,” Wright said. “He said, ‘It’s faithful enough to the original book to keep the fans happy, but different enough to keep me excited.’ And I was thinking, ah, you can’t say it better than that. I couldn’t ask for anything more, really.”
“The Running Man” is currently in theaters. To hear the entire conversation with Edgar Wright about and make sure you don’t miss a single episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.