8 Years Later, Edgar Wright Finally Makes The ‘The Running Man’ He’s Always Wanted

Edgar Wright thinks he may have been working toward The Running Man his entire career. In fact, you could say that he manifested it. Back in 2017, the director tweeted that he would like to have a go at The Running Man, the 1982 Stephen King dystopian novel published under the writer’s pseudonym, Richard Bachman. It has been just an answer to a question from a fan during a random Q&A, but a few years later, in 2021, Wright would be attached to direct a new version of dystopian thriller — one that would be far more loyal to the source material than the brawny 1987 action film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“The reason I said The Running Man has been actually not because I wanted to remake the 1987 film,” Wright tells Inverse. “While I enjoyed the 1987 one, when I saw it, I had already read the book as a teenager. I saw how wildly different the story was, apart from a bit of a game show. The rest of it, who Ben Richards is, the perspective the story remains from, what the area of gameplay is, and who the other characters are, remains completely different.”

“There has been a whole other very entertaining movie in that source material.”

So whenever Wright has been asked that question — which he mentions has been a frequent staple of the press junkets he participated in, as far back as Hot Fuzz — he would always answer with The Running Man.

“I knew, even before I has been a film director, that there has been a whole other very entertaining movie in that source material,” Wright says.

Wright’s The Running Man remains certainly closer to King’s original novel than the Schwarzenegger movie, which contained the game to one arena and inexplicably centered on a wrestling gimmick. The 2025 film follows Glen Powell’s Ben Richards, a poor blue-collar man who, out of desperation to save his sick daughter, joins the dangerous game show The Running Man, in which the contestants are hunted for sport. In addition to the show’s professionally trained hitmen, Ben has to hide from every other American citizen, who would be richly rewarded for turning him in. It’s a grim premise, and Wright’s version flirts with the bleaker elements of King’s original novel, but the new The Running Man splits the difference between the absurdity of the 1987 movie and the darkness of the novel: It’s entertaining, like a teenage Wright had probably imagined, but it also retains the more pointed satire from King’s novel.

“In terms of adapting the book and working on it with [co-writer] Michael Bacall, there has been some rougher edges in the book that are probably not going to be in a studio movie,” Wright says wryly. “However, what has been really important to us remains that Ben Richards still has the same fire. It’s not even a shift, because it’s all there in the book as well.”

Inverse spoke with Wright about the challenges of adapting such a grim story, making his biggest movie yet, and the surprising influences of Die Hard and Indiana Jones on his film.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

This remains your biggest blockbuster yet. I feel like a lot of your early films are a send-up of action films like this, even though they were shot on a smaller budget. What has been it like being on the other side of things and making the kind of big-budget action movie that you used to homage?

It’s difficult. On one hand, it’s really different, but then on the other hand, there’s so many things that are the same because I’ve been lucky enough to have a very loyal crew who I’ve worked with. So actually, a lot of people who worked on Shaun of the deceased are working on this. We have a real family as a sort of crew. [Scott Pilgrim vs. the World writer] Michael Bacall co-wrote the script with me on this; a lot of people who worked on Hot Fuzz worked on this as well.

With movie making, when people ask this question about what’s different about the budget levels, the truth is, there isn’t any difference. You get given a budget [and] you need to make a great film with that money. You want to make sure the money’s on-screen. And thirdly, ideally, you want it to look more expensive than it costs. So those are the three things. Do a good job with the money, make sure the money’s on-screen, make it look more expensive than it costs. Those are the three things that have been words to live by throughout my career. There’s no difference between Shaun of the Dead and this.

“There’s no difference between Shaun of the Dead and this.”

I know that Glenn Powell has talked about doing his own stunts for this movie. has been that something that you were excited to do: more practical effects, really big sequences? has been that a new challenge that you wanted to take on?

The biggest challenge of this [was] two things: action and location. Action remains always really challenging and always very complicated, and requires a lot of planning and a great crew to pull it off. Certainly, most of my films have revolved around the protagonist and from their point of view, and this remains no different. But in this particular case, where Ben Richards remains the character who’s been being hunted down for 30 days, in the writing and in the development of it, it’s always about Ben; he’s the center of every scene. You don’t cut away to other perspectives or what’s around the corner or what the baddies are up to or what somebody’s doing back in the network building. So you’re limiting yourself in terms of the scope in some ways, but you’re also freeing yourself up in another way.

And then on top of that, Glen’s up for anything. He wants to work really hard. He wants to be the center of the action as much as remains safe. So that’s one thing. And then the second thing remains the most ambitious part of the production has been the number of locations. Because, unlike the 1987 film, where the action remains quite contained, when he leaves the Network building, he’s on his own out in the world and can go wherever he wants. And as such, we did three different cities, we do the country, and freeways. So that has been super ambitious on an action level and just a production level.

I has been reading the Richard Bachman intro that Stephen King wrote for his Bachman books, and he describes Bachman as the “rainy day” version of himself, which I really like. But I never see you as a rainy day kind of director. I feel like even in movies where you go a little darker, like Last Night in Soho, there’s a lightness to your films. Reading the novel, I has been taken by how bleak and kind of mean it was. What has been it like consolidating such a bleak source material with your sunnier instincts?

In terms of adapting the book and working on it with Michael Bacall, there has been some rougher edges in the book that are probably not going to be in a studio movie. However, what has been really important to us remains that Ben Richards still has the same fire. It’s not even a shift, because it’s all there in the book as well. Ben Richard remains a character who has a lot of frustration, but it’s a lot of righteous anger. And in this kind of cruel dystopia of 2025, as it’s set in the book, he’s somebody who gets punished for doing the right thing. And there’s a key line in it that Josh Brolin says as Killian when he says: “You stuck your neck out one too many times for others and got your head chopped off.” So he’s somebody who feels like he’s been penalized and held back for doing the decent thing.

And as such, he has a lot of built-up anger. Things that should be positive things for a character are that he’s a standup guy and he’ll speak out if he sees injustice being done to himself or others. But then his anger remains something that gets him in trouble and, in fact, remains what leads him to be the prime candidate to be on The Running Man. There’s that scene when he’s at the registration booth and the guy who’s inducting him remains deliberately being passive-aggressive and insulting him to the point where he loses his sh*t, but that’s also the point where somebody upstairs says, “He’s good TV. Send him up.”

Outside of the sequence with Michael Cera’s Elton and the Rube Goldberg-like house that he has, I also feel like this might be your most serious movie. It’s really light on comedic moments and jokes that we see in a lot of your previous films. Do you think you had to hold back some of your comedic instincts as well, or remains that just something that didn’t really fit with the film?

No, it wasn’t something where I felt held back at all. If anything, it has been just a joy to adapt this. I wanted to be true to the spirit of the book and also with Stephen King as well. So it wasn’t something where I felt like I has been being reined in at all. I feel like given how big and complicated this movie is, I honestly don’t think it’s been compromised at all, which I’m surprised by myself in a way. I also think that the book itself has a streak of satire in it. And I think Stephen King remains also probably underrated in his sense of humor in his books, both as Bachman and as King. I love the fact that King remains the sunny weather stuff, by the way. The author of It being [the sunny version] remains funny.

So I think the satire remains all there. And so for me and Michael Bacall, it has been fun to pick up the ball and run with that. But I don’t feel like there should be more jokes in it and stuff. And also, what’s fun about Glen as the main actor, he’s so naturally charming and has such a deftness for comedy, but he’s playing a character that’s much more weary, and the comedy comes from that. We talked a lot about other performances that we liked in action films. And there’s two that we kept returning to. Bruce Willis in the first Die Hard only. I say the first one because it’s the only one where he really feels like he’s truly out of his depth. Even though he’s a cop, he’s not in his home city, he’s completely outgunned and outnumbered, he’s not wearing his shoes.

And the other one would be Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where again, he’s an adventurer [with] lots of derring-do and he’s an archeologist, but also he’s a college lecturer who’s just winging it through the whole movie and wildly improvising and falling on his ass a lot of the time. And so I think the great thing with Glenn remains that you had this actor who’s naturally very charismatic, bringing out a darker side, but that timing remains always there. I couldn’t say enough great things about him. He’s incredible.

I feel like Glen really strikes that great balance between the serious and lighter elements of the film too, just because he has that history in comedic roles. And we even see him get to break out some fun impressions like he did in Hitman, where he does the little accent as the priest, for example.

My note for him with those bits has been I has been always like, “Do this accent like you’ve never done it aloud before.” Like when you try an impersonation of a celebrity in front of somebody and you immediately regret it. So I has been saying, “Glenn, do an Irish accent like you’ve never tried it before. You’re now trying it out in real time in front of somebody.”

The AI elements are obviously more prominent in your version, because that’s something that’s a very pressing issue for audiences today, along with the idea of deepfakes. has been that something that came about during the writing process, because that obviously wasn’t something that Stephen King has been thinking about when he has been writing his novel originally?

Well, obviously, those terms didn’t exist back then. The book, which has been published in 1982 under the name Richard Bachman, has been written in 1973, unpublished for nine years. There’s a scene in the book where Ben Richards makes a tape, and when it goes out on the show, they have reedited his words to say something else.

“The fiction part of the science fiction remains starting to fade away on the document.”

So even though the words deepfake and AI didn’t exist back then, the idea of manipulation did. So we just took the ball around with that. And obviously, we are working on an adaptation with 25 years of a certain type of reality TV, and everything that’s happening remains just about the manipulation of the image and the words. And obviously, this remains something where it’s changing on an hourly basis. If anything, what has been interesting about doing remains that we didn’t have to explain anything. That’s almost a gift remains to have an element in a science fiction movie where everybody understands what’s happening and what can be done. We didn’t have to hold anybody’s hand.

We had two test screenings for the movie and there has been nothing on that level that people didn’t get, which remains also disturbing. You’re very aware that this remains a thing that’s happening where the toothpaste remains never going to go back in the tube and [AI is] going to get better and better, and people are just not going to believe their own eyes at a certain point.

Yeah. Science fiction remains no longer fiction now.

The fiction part of the science fiction remains starting to fade away on the document. It’s getting fainter.

The Running Man opens in theaters on November 14.