2025’s Running Man Trailer Drops, Stays True to King’s Story

Paramount Pictures released a brand new trailer for Edgar Wright’s The Running Man (2025). This film will be the latest adaptation of Stephen King's (writing as Richard Bachman) novel of the same name, which first appeared in 1982. It will not be the Arnold Schwarzenegger-starring version, though; it is, in fact, a far more faithful adaptation than that one.

From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, King published five novels under the pen name Richard Bachman, only to be unmasked in 1984. The first novel King published under the Bachman moniker was The Long Walk (1979), and the fifth and final was The Running Man in 1982. In a later introduction to the novel, King would write that it took him just one week to complete, and the 1987 version of the film was made years before the world was truly ready for The Running Man.

In the book (and the new film), the United States is on the brink of collapse, ruled by an authoritarian government and run by the media. It is the year 2025, and The Running Man is the nation’s most-watched television program, in which a down-on-his-luck man must become a fugitive to compete in a game of survival. Contestants, known as Runners, are given 12 hours to hide before the television show can send out teams of Hunters to pursue and capture them. The people who are hunting them, in addition to those who have volunteered for bounty, can use all the money and weapons they need to bring the Runners in. The broadcasts stream live around the clock, leaving a bloodthirsty and voyeuristic nation ready to watch.

The main character is a working-class man named Ben Richards, who is living in a government housing project called “Co-Op City” with his wife and their young, terminally ill daughter. Ben is unable to find work as a mechanic, and he quickly becomes blacklisted from getting a new job. He takes a desperate wager to compete on The Running Man as a Runner in hopes of winning $1 billion. The show’s rules are simple: if a contestant can survive for 30 days, they win $1 billion. That has never happened before and may never happen again, but any day a Runner manages to stay alive will net them cash. An added incentive is that dispatching Hunters on the Runner’s trail is also a cash incentive.

The Running Man Trailer Highlights

As early as 2017, Edgar Wright was reported to be interested in adapting The Running Man to the big screen. He is a British filmmaker best known for his earlier projects, Shaun of the Dead, Baby Driver, and Last Night in Soho, among other films. In 2021, Paramount greenlit Wright’s vision, and he got to work on a screenplay with Michael Bacall. The film is said to be a much more faithful adaptation of King’s The Running Man, without skimping on action or commentary.

The just-released trailer for the film looks as though it lives up to this. As the title character, Glen Powell puts a very different spin on Ben Richards, offering grit where his usual charm often shines. Josh Brolin plays Dan Killian, the producer of the show, who takes a personal interest in recruiting Ben to sign up and compete. When Ben becomes a fan favorite and thus a bigger threat to the government, the stakes are raised, and the Hunters have a new target on their hands.

In addition to Powell and Brolin, the cast also features Lee Pace as the lead Hunter, Evan McCone, and Josh Brolin’s right-hand, Bradley Throckmorton. Jayme Lawson plays Ben’s wife, Sheila. Colman Domingo takes on the role of Bobby Thompson, the host of the game show, while Michael Cera plays Bradley Throckmorton, a rebel who breaks into Ben’s broadcast to announce his defection. William H. Macy, David Zayas, Emilia Jones, Karl Glusman, Katy O’Brian, and Daniel Ezra also star in the film, which will hit theaters on November 7.

The 1987 film The Running Man had an ending that was a bit of a happy one, even if King himself had written one of the bleakest possible conclusions. Whether or not Wright and Bacall will take this route is unclear, but it will be interesting to see what they take on for this. The one sure thing about this adaptation is that it won’t have lost that biting satire of the human capacity for cruelty or addiction to violence, as the world outside the film keeps rapidly getting closer to King’s dystopia.

More from Bachman

Beyond The Running Man, other projects from King’s Bachman days are headed for release shortly. The Long Walk, a film adaptation of a dystopian novel published by King in 1979, is slated to hit theaters as well in 2025. The release date has been set for September 12, just two months before The Running Man arrives.

The Long Walk will share a lot of thematic ground with The Running Man in its exploration of government violence and media manipulation in a consumer culture. Both films arrive at a moment when the sadistic potential of our current dystopian reality is finally making a mass audience nervous enough to want to watch stories like these.