Glen Powell Stars in Edgar Wright’s Gritty Running Man Remake

Paramount Pictures has dropped the first trailer for The Running Man, which will be released in theaters on November 7, 2025. The film is the latest addition to director Edgar Wright’s filmography and marks a reboot of Stephen King’s iconic dystopian thriller novel of the same name, which was published under his pen name Richard Bachman in 1982.

The Running Man joins the early careers of other horror and suspense writers like Dean Koontz, with whom King would later collaborate. In the late 1970s, King started publishing using his Bachman pseudonym, eventually releasing six novels before the name was revealed in 1984. It’s unclear exactly how much of The Running Man was written under Bachman, though fans and biographers of the author largely agree on one point: his working-class protagonist was penned as a scrawny, pre-tubercular man fueled by hunger and revenge.

The novel and the new film revolve around a totalitarian United States, reeling from economic collapse, and take place in the year 2025 (coincidentally, when the film is due for release). The movie is a harrowing view of a police state where one of the most-watched programs is a “network killing game” where contestants called Runners are pursued by the Hunters (professional assassins) while being streamed on live television.

The Working Man and Survivor competitor at the heart of the book/film, Ben Richards, is the family man and show contestant. He’s blacklisted and on the verge of losing his family’s home in the New York borough of “Co-Op City” because he can’t land a steady job. He has a wife and a sick daughter, and after failing to make ends meet with honest work, he decides to play the deadly game of The Running Man to provide for his family, joining a host of others who have been pushed to the margins of society and lured by the promise of money or fame or an escape from their current circumstances.

The studio released the first look at the project back in June, announcing a star-studded cast of characters that was finally revealed in its trailer this week.

The show is deadly and simple. Last 30 days and you win one billion dollars. Last 197 hours and you’re the record holder. But every day a contestant survives is cash in hand, with a little more for every Hunter dispatched along the way. For desperate contestants, those are important incentives. Ben Richards, when he’s pushed to sign up for the show by a slick salesman, is just average—but he’s also pretty good at it. He’s something of a media darling, and at the same time, a threat to a totalitarian regime.

Schwarzenegger’s take on the concept, which veered from King’s novel more than most faithful adaptations, still had a certain shred of the novel’s sardonic, eye-rolling takes on the then-current state of media and capitalism. The original Ben Richards, though not without his moments, was more pumped-up televangelist than chained-to-the-subway-rails desperado. The ’87 movie was a faster-paced, sunnier, and more visceral take on Bachman’s decidedly spikier and sadder vision.

The long-gestating Running Man, helmed by Wright, was first attached to the comedy director in 2017. It received the green light from Paramount Pictures two years later, and Wright and Michael Bacall were brought on board to co-write the project, which has been rumbling on in development ever since. Early on, Wright told Empire that, if he took on the film, it would look at the source material with fresh eyes. “I kind of want to use the original Running Man as kind of a tone poem, a warning and a reminder,” he said. “As a kind of thumb in the eye of social media, or what has happened with social media. What social media companies have done is take a kind of ugly, grotesque, shameless tabloid TV show and turned it into our entire social interaction.”

For longtime Wright fans, the trailer reads as an assurance that this reboot of The Running Man is in safe hands. He has carved a career from smart, assured pop filmmaking that knows its history without worshiping it or forgetting where to inject the occasional wink and nod to the fandom. That promise is well on display here: it’s vivid, funny in its bone-dry way, and featuring a great cast, it shows promise of being true to Wright’s and Bachman’s vision for the material.

The one thing that remains to be seen? If Wright and Bacall go for the book’s more notorious ending, which is as cheerless as the body count is high. It’s the sort of gut-punch moment King fans are used to, but one that feels uncomfortably more real for anyone who has been paying attention.

Fellow Bachman’s work is coming this year

Stephen King’s loyal readers have another Bachman work to enjoy later this year in the form of The Long Walk, another dystopian competition story which was written in 1979 and will also see its screen adaptation in 2025. As with Running Man, the film is slated to hit theaters on September 12, 2025.

Beyond the coincidental release dates and topical focus on government and media cruelty, the two films are thematically bound by their willingness to blend social commentary with pulse-pounding action. Fans of King’s horror fiction will have plenty of reason to watch, as it seems Stephen King has new writing projects in the works as well.