The Running Man (2025)

In a fascist dystopian near future not that far from our own present, America's favorite TV show is "The Running Man,” a reality tv competition that features the most dangerous game of all, and Ben Richards is the latest contestant.

The Running Man is one of the myriad stories written by that well-known pop culture powerhouse Stephen King.

Since before I was born, Stephen King has been known as “The King of Horror.” He has published sixty-plus novels and novellas–including this one, one of seven stories published under his pen name Richard Bachmann–as well as half-a-dozen other nonfiction books, and more than 200 short stories, most of which have been published in various collections, all told, selling more than 400 million copies. A ridiculous amount of these stories have been adapted into various films, tv shows, and comic books. For good or for ill, all by himself or with the oft-rumored "help" of his assistants, the man is basically a god dam story machine. In fact, he’s one of the main pillars of American pop culture, especially in the late 20th Century. And he is definitely the ur-source for a plethora of Gen X tropes and allusions. Plus, his “scary” stories turned him into a kind of boogeyman too, at least during the 1980s and 90s. This is mostly due to the prudish naivety of the Baby Boomer generation, mixed with their knee-jerk white Christian ignorance, and the rose-colored glasses nostalgia for their 1950s/60s era childhoods, which meant that they were always ready to poo-poo pop culture, all while seemingly sincerely believing that the long-ago abandoned values of their vague hippy past meant they were forward-thinkers, but whatever, in the end, it was a role that King seemed to relish, and he leaned into it as a brand.

As a result, his "super scary" and "disturbing" stories became a kind of rite of passage for young Gen Xers. This was because, children of the time–at least those few who actually chose to read when not forced, and were willing to admit to it in public, and also weren't brain-damaged due to the Satanic Panic stupidity that was infecting their idiot parents–were often too scared to pick up a Stephen King book when they were young, specifically because King had such a strong reputation for being way too scary, and even maybe evil. At the time, specifically because of their dipshit parents, Stephen King books were often looked at as one of those things (along with heavy metal music, trench coats, and black tshirts), that bad kids were into. They were gross. They were crass. They were low brow. They were dangerous. They were also considered, by the same idiot asshole Boomers who have since gone on to hoard all the wealth and power and to directly create the exact situation that gave us Trump, to be one of the main signifiers of a potential devil worshipper. At the time, such a charge could get you jailed or killed, just ask the West Memphis 3. It’s an incredibly fucking stupid thing to think, especially in the kind of ignorant and isolated white enclaves whose only connection to other cultures is the local Del Taco, but this is who white middle Americans were in the 80s and 90s… a bunch of stupid fucking blustering assholes, too dumb to realize how fucking dumb they are, and that’s something that hasn’t changed at all either. In fact, all that’s changed is these same fucking dummies switched “devil worshiper” to “groomer” or “woke” or “trans” or whatever else their little nazi pea-brains were able to retain after getting their marching orders from FOX News. But all that aside, what this mostly meant, was that reading King books as a kid back in the 80s and 90s was cool.

In fact, simply bringing a dog-eared copy of Cujo over to a friend's house could result in their simpleton parents labelling you as the kind of "bad kid" they didn't want their perfect little angel hanging out with. So if you were a kid back in the 80s and 90s, and you like to read Stephen King books, you were not only signaling to the world that you were a big kid, old enough to think for yourself, old enough to read what you wanted to, you were also a bold and daring young rebel, and not to mention, a little scary yourself...

Relatively, of course.

You were still just a huge nerd, but whatever...

The funniest part of all that is, in actuality, most of his stories really weren't that scary at all. There were some horror elements, sure, and a few disturbing moments (not to mention a few... ah... problematic moments. I'm looking at you, Bev's Sewer Gang Bang Scene...) but the reality was, for the most part, they were a lot closer to the kind of magical fantasy/superpower stories that one might find in most fantasy books, just in a more modern setting, or they dealt with the kind of topics that you could read about in X-Men comic books, or see in a Spielberg/Amblin movie. In short, once I was brave enough to actually pick up my first Stephen King book (It was Firestarter, by the way), I discovered that they were actually right up my Star Wars kid/Comic book fan alley.

I loved them.

So, yeah, I love Stephen King.

His stories have been hugely influential on what I liked to read and watch, and the kind of stories that I write. In fact, my first (unpublished) novel was dedicated to "Three Georges and a Stephen" which was meant to be Lucas, Miller, Romero, and King. As much of a big fucking doofus as he is, for all his foibles and his favored digressions, not to mention his constant “be-bop“ talk, and his absolute inability to write modern children in a way where they don’t sound like characters from an episode of Leave it to Beaver, he was one of my initial guiding lights.

Just as an aside, as a little bit of proof… back in the day, back when kids were allowed to wander around alone, not causing trouble, without some asshole calling the cops, one of the few places where I could get my comics was the Hallmark shop near my Grandparent's house in Boone, Iowa. This was one of my favorite things to do. I'd save, beg, borrow, and steal as much money as could, sometimes as much as seven or eight dollars maybe. Then I'd walk the couple of miles to the depressingly crumbling decrepitude of Boone, Iowa’s downtown, a sadly typical 1980s railroad-dependent small town with no option and no future. And there in the far back of that Hallmark shop, past the knick-knacks and cards, the curios, tchotchkes, and Precious Moments and paperbacks… there was a huge rack of comics. Five by five, three or four shelves worth. The ladies who worked there never bothered me as I'd kneel on the floor back there, and go through each issue, carefully deciding which ones I wanted, all the while doing the most math that I'd ever do in my life, trying to figure out the maximum amount of comics I could get with the money I had in my pocket. And being that comics back then were between 35¢ and 70¢ (they're $4 a pop now…), it was usually quite a haul. Then I’d lay on my grandmother’s living room floor, as the radio played the light muzak station she would listen to, and the wind chimes on the back porch tinkled and chimed, as she hummed while cleaning the kitchen, and I’d idly read each issue, and maybe trace the pictures, and just have a good time.

It was my favorite thing to do.

But one day… after who knows how long I spent figuring out my optimum comic haul from the Hallmark shop that day, as I was heading up to the counter, I passed the shelf of paperbacks, and I saw this...

And I stopped dead in my tracks.

What the fuck was this? The Stand? My favorite Stephen King book? The epic post-apocalyptic tale of a deadly flu pandemic wiping out the majority of the world, and then, before the ashes of the old world even had a chance to settle, survivors all over the country find themselves driven by uneasy dreams to travel across the face of this broken country, littered with corpses, to gather in one of two camps. One in Boulder, Colorado. One in Las Vegas, Nevada. One led by a prophet of God, and the other, the hand of Satan. And now, these survivors are fated to face each other in one final battle of good and evil?

An already huge novel, now it's available in an even longer version?

Oh, fuck yeah, I’m in. Even though it meant that I had to use all of my money to buy this book, which meant I wouldn't get any comics that day, I immediately put the comics back and I bought the complete and uncut version of The Stand instead. I mean... c'mon now. It was a no-brainer.

That’s how much I loved King’s stuff.

I love Edgar Wright‘s stuff too.

Not as much as King, of course. And sure, Wright has definitely had a couple of big stumbles, but that doesn’t matter, because The Cornetto Trilogy are the kind of all-timer movies that earned him an all-time pass from me, or at least a fair first look. I obviously have a big soft spot for Shaun of the Dead, for reasons that I’m sure you can probably guess, but The World's End is really the one for me. It's incredible. I love that film.

But that said…

I'm super fucking "meh" when it comes to Glen Powell. Much like his natural opposite, Sydney Sweeney, I just don’t see the appeal. Sure, they're attractive, I guess, in vaguely attractive terms. But beyond that, I got nothing. I’m not saying they're terrible, they’re just… bland. They're like a generic drawing of a leading actor/actress. Plus, Powell is obviously only interested in projects if they give him a chance to wear a wig and/or a fake mustache, which was kind of funny at first, but now it's starting to get weird. I think, much like the guy in the second Tron movie, he's eventually going to turn out to be yet another name in a long line of basic-ass zoolander-ian “model, idiot" actors. He’s just another of those vaguely handsome white guys that Hollywood regularly digs up, and then works so weirdly hard at turning into a big time movie star, giving them this meteroic-like rise where, for a brief moment, they seem to be everywhere, but then everyone finally admits that they’re actually just another forgettable dud. I think he’ll end up playing a cop on some boring CBS procedural like Baywatch: Floribama Shore, or something.

And while I didn't intend for Sydeny Sweeney to catch a bunch of strays here, I think the same thing is going to eventually happen to her too, but moreso because she keeps having these "PR oopsies" where her and her family's wealthy MAGA white supremacy beliefs keep getting exposed. Eventually she'll be playing the wife of Chris Pratt's Navy SEAL character in some Christian Faith-based film.

So yeah, I’m not a big fan.

I'm also not a big fan of the original story of The Running Man, or the 1987 Schwarzenegger film version of it. The book was originally published in 1982 and its from the "angry cokehead" era of King stories. It also has this weird moment where one character quizzes his little bother on whether or not he has been able to masturbate to completetion yet, which is so fucking weird, it's stuck with me for maybe 40 years now. And the 1987 movie only ended up seeming too limited by scope, budget, and imagination, and if we’re being honest, it’s definitely one of the lesser Schwarzeneggers. Also, as a low-key Predator cast reunion, it only reminded of me of how much better that film was. So, yeah, not my favorite King, and not my favorite Schwarzenegger.

So while, for some people out there, a big part of the appeal of this 2025 film version of the Running Man was that it was going to be a more faithful adaptation of the original story, and not a remake of the 1987 film version, I wasn't drawn in by that. This is because, as I said, I'm not a big fan of the original story, but also, the 1987 film based itself on that gaudy and stupid black hole of American culture, the tv show American Gladiators, choosing to dump a lot of the TV show ideas that King had in the original story. A lot of this is due to the fact that, even though King somehow pretty accurately predicted 2025, the year the original story is set in, way back in 1982, the actual concept of Reality TV still hadn't been invented yet when the 1987 movie was being made. When it came out, the Morton Downey Jr. talk show had only just begun, and the first season of the Real World was still five years away, the era of trash tv was still a blissfully as yet unrealized reality, so it makes sense that the basis of the show in the original story really wasn't a relatable idea.

Also, lets be honest here, the 1987 film made its changes because the 1982 story ideas, the ideas for what the show would be like in the original story, were actually kind of boring. The 1987 version was simply more exciting. I mean, who wouldn't turn in to see a pale fat guy in his underwear and Christmas lights, killing people by firing bolts of electricity at them, all while singing opera?

C’mon, now…

In the end, I wasn't alone in being uninterested in this film either, as the movie-going audience largely ignored it too. Bombing at the box office, The Running Man only grossed around 69 million worldwide against a budget of around 110 million. And after watching it, to me, it makes sense, as this version of The Running Man mostly only seems to be asking a question out loud that I think everyone has been wondering for a while now…

Does Edgar Wright need Simon Pegg in order to make good movies?

Now, some people might choose this moment to pop in and say... but didn't Stephen King say that he didn't like the 1987 version at all, and that he loves this new version?

Yes.

But to be clear, I believe what he actually said was that this film is a "bipartisan thrill ride" and I'm gonna tell you right now, I don't know what the fuck that even means. But to me, it sounds like the kind of mealy-mouthed bullshit rich white people often say as code for: “If you’re a bigot white American GOP/Trumper, or a white centrist scumbag bigot, this won't piss you off by undeniably portraying you and your friends and family and your fascist corporate masters as the irredeemable bad guys that you really are, so feel free to give me your money, dummy."

But... that particular red flag aside, I think this is maybe a good time to remind everyone that Stephen King absolutely does not give a shit about the quality of the films and shows and comics that are adapted from his work. Absolutely does not give a shit. He only cares that you buy a ticket, and as a result, pour more of your money down his throat. I don't fault him for this. Why on Earth be honest about it? "No, actually it's pretty bad." Why would he do that? The quality of these things are totally beyond his control, and really, what the fuck does he care if it's good or not? He gets paid regardless, and either way, the book still exists, so fuck it, who cares? Honestly, the fact that, for as long as I have been alive, Stephen King has consistently been cold-bloodedly mercenary about the fact that he does not give a shit if an adaptation of his work is bad, and will almost always give it a thumbs up...? I respect his clear-headed priorities.

You, a fan, a simpleton, a fool: "Hey, Mr. King, sir? What do you think about the latest adaptation of your book?"

Stephen King, a fucking genius, answering without hesitation: "It's great. You should buy two tickets."

Because the honest to God truth is, not only must Stephen King hold the record for the amount of books he has written that have been adapted for film and TV, he also has to hold the record for most amount of times that adaptations of his work have turned out to be absolute fucking garbage. Just terrible. A basic rule of thumb here is this: A Stephen King book being adapted to film or tv is like a video game being adapted to film and tv... they're almost always fucking terrible.

That's like gravity, it's just undeniable.

But even funnier? The few times when Stephen King doesn't do this? The few times when he doesn't give a thumb's up to whatever the latest adaptation of his work is? It's almost always for the ones that not only aren't 100% faithful, but it's almost uneeringly always for those few exceptions to the rules, for those rare few outlier adaptations of his work that are actually good. By way of example, he hates Kubrick's Shining with a passion, and he loved that crappy TV movie version of it that starred the guy from Wings. Honestly, to me, a long time fan who has followed him and what he thinks for a long time now, if you take this, and you couple it with some of the other things he will occasionally recommend on social media, to me…it’s pretty clear that Stephen King actually has pretty bad taste.

So, always take his thumbs up with a grain of salt, y'know?

Anyway, the movie...

Set in a Day-After-Tomorrow world (one that is basically our own present day world, just one that‘s been strewn with some familiar cyberpunk accoutrements), where everything is ruled by a fascist and corrupt corporate government and their TV propaganda (again, just like our modern day world), Ben Richards is a good man in a bad world. He is also unemployed, specifically for being a good man, and is also unemployable, as he’s been black-balled for union activities. As a result, he is unable to afford his daughter’s medicine.

But hey, at least his tv works.

Faced with very few options, other than petty crime, or his wife giving rich guys handjobs for tips at the rich guy handjob restaurant where she works double shifts, Ben is desperate, so he signs up to be a contestant on the country’s most popular tv show…

The Running Man.

A mix between a gaudy game show and trashy reality television, the whole idea behind The Running Man is that, with a $1000 cash and a 12 hour head start, the three chosen contestants, known as "Runners," can win $1 billion if they are able to survive for 30 days on run. As long as they film themselves and deposit the tape in the mail each day, that is. And all while the show’s Hunters, led by a mysterious masked man known as McCone—and also aided by everyday citizens who are more than willing to be snitches on social media—are trying to find the Runners and kill them before the 30 days are up.

So, right away, Ben bee-lines it straight to his buddy, who is a classic “conspiracy nut who turned out to be right” kind of paranoid underground guy, who seems to have the market cornered on selling black market contraband, and it really bothers me that neither one of them think to check Ben‘s clothes for hidden trackers. But then, Ben is a big dumbass who doesn’t take his whole situation seriously enough, and is generally so unobservant and completely lacking in being tactically-minded, and mostly just survives off of pure luck, so it absolutely annoys the shit out of me while I’m watching the film. I’m pretty sure it’s the same in the book, but it sucked there too, and I hated it.

Anyway, once Ben is safely ensconced in a skid row rooming house where each floor has a communal bathroom, Ben the dumb shit immediately strips naked, and walks down the hall wearing only a towel, in order to take a shower. As a result, he is almost killed while butt-naked when McCone’s Hunters show up, guns a‘blazing.

This is indicative of the whole film, and it bothers me.

First of all, in certain situations, even if you aren’t being hunted, you definitely want to keep your valuables with you at all times, even when you take a shower. But that having been said, he is being hunted, so… why not wear his clothes to the shower maybe, and get undressed there, just so they’re close by, y’know… just in case, like maybe if those Hunters who are chasing you show up? Or maybe, I don’t know… here’s a thought, maybe don’t immediately take a shower, at least until you know more definitively that you’re safe. I know, I know, the story is basically that the hunters are on his trail, and often just miss catching him, but as I’ve probably mentioned before, I would rather watch movies where smart heroes make smart decisions, even if they still end up in a world of shit, instead of ones where dumb assholes are stupid, and make stupid decisions, and only survive by pure luck, which is basically what this movie’s entire plot is.

So, after this, Ben moves through various locations, often meeting up with various anti-Corporate activists, so he glimpses the anti-propaganda network that opposes Corporate control. He goes to Boston, and to Derry, Maine (because, of course, as it’s a Stephen King novel. There was no mention of It, though, at least, not as far as I noticed). Along the way, they all witness the undeniable absolute Evil of GenAI, as the Corporation uses it in an attempt to manipulate the country against Ben Richards in much the same way that the Trump Administration does on a regular basis, mostly by using racist and xenophobic memes, often based directly off historical Nazi Propaganda, which is then distributed by their network of eager and willingly complicit, obvious bad faith grifter bigot influencers.

In the end, Ben Richards is the last contestant left still running.

Taking an oblivious young woman and everyday citizen named Amelia Williams—someone who has a lot in common with so much of modern Americans, especially white Christian Americans, as she is a dull, vacuous, and privileged fool who never seems to even come up out of her reality show fandom haze, let alone consider the idea that maybe they should engage critically with the media of her world, at least beyond the shallow ways that they usually do—and he uses her as a hostage to get the Corporation to get him a jet to Canada. They agree to this, as long as Ben lets McCone escort him. Amelia agrees to help Ben after she sees that the Corporation has released a deepfake of her screaming for help from her car.

At this point, things go bad in the expected ways. Backroom deals are offered. Double-crosses happen. Terrible truths are revealed. There’s some grunting and grappling, and of course, the plane is depressurized, and everyone has to hang on or get sucked out into midair. Everyone is revealed to be a corporate tool of some kind. People are killed. Others faked their own death. Fake news is disseminated. Sometime later, Amelia, now a radicalized riot girl, helps some of the previously introduced revolutionaries to turn the public against the fascist Corporation, using Ben as the face of the revolution.

And finally, when the next season of The Running Man begins, on the season premiere, the revolution is finally televised…

The Running Man is a film that attempts to be about the helplessness of the individual while caught beneath the iron treads of the horrifically fascist society that they eagerly helped to build, but for the most part… it’s pap. It’s been years since I’ve actually read the story, but this was all pretty familiar in general, so I think it’s mostly faithful. Except the ending, which is brand new. But all that really means is that all of the problems of the original story, it’s generally bland pacing and series of events, are all there, but now its capped off with a trite and rushed ending that exposes the all-around hollowness of the story, and that it’s really more like a few good ideas strung together than an actually well-told tale.

The original story of The Running Man was a story of a future (present day) America that is ravaged by poverty, disease, inequity, an out-of-control wealth gap, a general lack of affordability, and a white supremacy-based fascism, all controlled by a complicit media apparatus through vapid and ugly content completely devoid of culture or meaning, meant to amuse its vacant-eyed and anesthetized audience in their off-hours when they’re not working themselves to death, with the ever-out-of-reach promise of big cash prizes and better lives… as long as they‘re willing to try to avoid being murdered on live tv. It is a high-concept and very broad satire, but one that doesn’t have an ending to speak of besides Ben saying “fuck you” and spitting in the bad guys’ faces, mostly because the over-all awfulness of the future (present day) world King wrote about is just too irrevocably fucked for one man to make a real difference, so… it just stops, instead of showing the truth, which is Ben Richards being smeared across society’s windshield like a bug, and then forgotten.

I don’t know, maybe this movie would’ve been better as a series. Maybe its world and its message, not to mention its dumb and rushed ending, just needed space for it to stretch and breathe, so that it could say what it wants to say, but… honestly, I don’t know if the original story, and as a result, this film, really has anything other to say than… this kind reality show/game show content fucking sucks, and it sucks because the world that created sucks. And maybe this is why the film’s ending is so rushed, because the idea that simply stating the obvious truth about what all these corporations and billionaires and fascists are clearly doing in broad daylight seems so naive as to be laughable. Edgar Wright obviously understands that all the shows and commercials that appear in this film are indistinguishable from things you can see now, but still, try as it might, The Running Man is no Robocop. It‘s no Starship Troopers.

Not even close.

Maybe this is what Stephen King actually meant when he called this movie a “bipartisan thrill ride,” that it generally lacks the spine to be honest, because that means that it has to be mean, and it doesn’t want to do that, so it not only has no real intention to saying anything with any real meaning it’s simply incapable of doing so, because much like the aging and inept weak sauce national leadership of the Democratic Party, it was born mostly out of a concern for lining its pockets. And maybe Wright understood this too. This isn’t one of his projects. This film is work-for-hire. That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t care about it, but ultimately, this movie is clearly a product of the Hollywood Studio Tent Pole Blockbuster machine, a system that is now almost as chronically out-of-touch with regular society as the aforementioned Democratic Party leadership is. I mean, they were clearly shocked when this film flopped at the box office.

So, maybe this is why Wright chose for Schwarzenegger’s cameo to be on the money. Because maybe this part wasn’t just a cameo because he was the star of the previous version of the story, maybe it was also Wright holding up an icon of the 80s, the Decade of Me, the era where the Baby Boomers first set this country on its path of irrevocable ruin, the era where Reagan and the White Christian horde first began their agenda of white Christian supremacy in earnest. So maybe this cameo was as close to an indictment as Wright was able to actually do in this “bipartisan thrill ride” when it comes to pointing to who it is that are actually responsible for bringing us all to this point.

Or maybe not. Maybe it’s just a bad movie.

A distinct possibility, as at one point, the film uses Ben’s dream sequence, which shows the Hunters capturing and interrogating Ben Richards’ underground black market buddy, and this then turns out to be exactly what actually happened. This was hack bullshit, the hackiest of hacky bullshit. It‘s the kind of narrative decision that should result in jail sentences for everyone who is even tangentially involved. Absolutely unforgivable.

I think The Running Man (2025) is a good example of a dead and uninteresting system flailing about in a desperate attempt to deny its own irrelevance, and only creating more lifeless garbage, because that’s all it can do as it putrifies and dies. The plot is too neat, too trite, it’s excessively predictable, and finally wraps up in a way that is not only rushed, but felt like it was ending because it simply needed to be over. But who knows… Maybe it’s over-simplistic, maybe easily understood is the way to go. Maybe attempting to speak to the dullards is laudable? But did it? Did it speak to the dullards? Did they watch it? Did they connect the dots? From the Box Office receipts and the general response, I’d say no, so maybe all that shit doesn’t matter either. Maybe the truth is, the films frankly silly “aspirational“ ending only highlights how absurd the whole thing is.

Boring. Bland. Forgettable.

The Running Man (2025) isn’t worth your time.