Edgar Wright's reboot of The Running Man is still a go – and the filmmaker says it'll be a faithful adaptation of Stephen King's original novel.
"The Running Man is something that is in active development," Wright told the Happy Sad Confused Podcast. "Why is that interesting to me? It’s like, I like the film but I like the book more, and they didn’t really adapt the book. Even as a teenager when I saw the Schwarzenegger film I was like, 'Oh, this isn’t like the book at all!' And I think, 'Nobody’s done that book.'"
The dystopian sci-fi novel was first published in 1982 under King's Richard Bachman persona. Set in the year 2025, the story follows protagonist Ben Richards as he becomes a contestant in a reality show called The Running Man. The contestants, allowed to run anywhere in the world, are chased by the general public – who win a huge sum of money if they kill them.
A very loose adaptation of the novel hit theaters in 1987, directed by Paul Michael Glaser and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as Ben Richards. Wright's adaptation was announced back in 2021, with Michael Bacall set to pen the script.
Continued Wright: "So when that came up, I was thinking, and Simon Kinberg says, 'Do you have any interest in ‘The Running Man?' I said, 'You know what? I’ve often thought that that book is something crying out to be adapted.' Now, that doesn’t mean that it’s easy! But it’s something that we are working on, yes. I’ll tell you that much."
