The Running Man: Glen Powell Runs for Survival in New Trailer

Paramount Pictures has leaked a new trailer for The Running Man (2025), directed by Edgar Wright. This project represents a new adaptation of Stephen King’s dystopian thriller novel, originally published as Richard Bachman’s work in 1982. But, unlike the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger action film, Edgar Wright’s film will be a more faithful and in many ways grittier adaptation of King’s novel.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, King published several novels using his pseudonym Richard Bachman. He was ‘outed’ as Bachman in 1984, but the most well-known novel of his Bachman-era work was Running Man, which King wrote in one week. The novel was set in the year 2025 in a dystopian version of America, where the country’s most popular show is a violent, reality-based game where contestants called Runners are hunted by hired assassins, or Hunters.

In the novel, Ben Richards is a man who lives in the “Co-Op City” district of the nation’s capital with his wife and terminally ill daughter. Richards is blacklisted by the government and the state-run employment agency, but he is still willing to do any job, even a lowly one, to provide for his family. Richards’ luck runs out, however, when his wife’s lung cancer medication expires and the family is nearly destitute. As a last-ditch effort to support his family, Richards decides to take a gamble and sign up for The Running Man, the nation’s highest-rated reality television game show.

Runners are assigned a 12-hour head start and, as the name suggests, must try to outrun and outlast the Hunters who are dispatched by the game’s mysterious producers. All the action is broadcast by drone-cam, and the nation’s citizenry, many of whom can afford only one new pair of eyeglasses a year to watch the show, are deeply invested in who wins each day. Richards is tagged an enemy of the state and offered up as a prime target by his nation’s leaders. Each day of survival in the game is worth a small monetary amount to the Runner who makes it that far, and each Hunter that is killed yields a reward as well, which can provide an incentive for contestants with a long way to go.

The rules are simple: stay alive for 30 days and you win a billion dollars. It’s a bleak setup, and no one in the history of the game has made it past 197 hours alive. Ben Richards does better than might be expected, but as anyone familiar with King’s work will know, this is not a story that has a happy ending.

The original 1987 film adaptation took some key elements of the book, the reality game show, and the general premise and set it on a new path, moving the action to a more futuristic, high-tech future. It also drenched the film in the late-1980s action flick DNA, including a Schwarzenegger who was the polar opposite of King’s original “scrawny” and “pre-tubercular” Ben Richards. The cast and crew of the film were having a ball, and, while fun, the big-budget actioner veered far away from the book’s more bleak satire.

Wright has been attached to The Running Man project since 2017, when he first expressed an interest in directing a new film version of the novel. In 2021, Paramount Pictures gave Wright and Michael Bacall the green light to move forward on their script, with a goal of remaining faithful to King’s novel while also including the action and subversive commentary on which Wright has built his brand.

The new trailer released by Paramount certainly appears to set the tone. The film’s Ben Richards is played by Glen Powell, and the trailer shows a man much more desperate and dirty than audiences have previously seen from the Fractured casting. Josh Brolin is Dan Killian, a former associate of Richards’ who now works as a producer for The Running Man television show, and convinces Ben to sign up. As Ben takes the game by storm and becomes a fan favorite, however, he also begins to threaten the existing political order.

Lee Pace plays Evan McCone, a former assassin and Head Hunter on the show, who is personally assigned to track Ben down and bring him in. Jayme Lawson is Ben’s wife, Sheila, Colman Domingo hosts the game as Bobby Thompson, and Michael Cera plays rebel Bradley Throckmorton. There are also supporting roles for William H. Macy, David Zayas, Emilia Jones, Karl Glusman, Katy O’Brian, and Daniel Ezra.

It remains to be seen if Wright and Bacall’s film will end on a similar note to King’s stark and relentlessly miserable original ending. But it seems unlikely that this version will steer too far away from the despondent themes of desperation, exploitation, and the numbing power of entertainment violence that form the core of the novel.

The Year of the Bachman Works

Fans of King’s Bachman-era books and adaptations have another reason to keep an eye on the year 2025, as a film adaptation of another dystopian, competition-based King novel is also due out. The Long Walk, a 1979 novel about a similarly dystopian version of the United States, has been on its road to the screen for years.

In the past few years, there have been script and even director changes, but the new film version of The Long Walk is due to arrive in theaters on September 12, 2025, just two months before The Running Man arrives. The two books have many similarities in terms of their political themes, media complicity, and the overarching horrors of the competition-based entertainment in both stories.