The Running Man director Edgar Wright says it felt like he was making the movie "for an audience of one" after getting Stephen King's seal of approval on his new ending

Katy O'Brian, Glen Powell, and Martin Herlihy as Laughlin, Ben Richards, and Jansky in The Running Man

(Image credit: Paramount Pictures)

Edgar Wright's take on The Running Man is a more faithful adaptation of Stephen King's novel than the 1987 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, but the Cornetto trilogy director still made some changes to the source material.

One of the biggest alterations is the movie's ending – we won't spoil it here, of course, but it differs from the book. However, Wright reveals that he and co-writer Michael Bacall (who he previously worked with on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) got King's seal of approval on their new conclusion.

First published in 1982 under King's pseudonym Richard Bachman, The Running Man is set in a dystopian version of the near-future and follows Ben Richards (Glen Powell), an unemployed father desperate for cash to help his sick daughter. He ends up as a contestant on brutal reality show The Running Man, in which contestants have the impossible task of outwitting a team of elite Hunters for 30 days in order to win $1 billion.

"So for the man himself to say that, we were like, 'Okay, great.' And then it adds a new pressure as well, because, like, oh, now we have to make it. When you're making a movie, you're always trying to live up to the version that's in your head, even the version that I thought of that I had in my head when I read it when I was 14. But now I also have to live up to what's in Stephen King's head as well. So I think then for the rest of the movie, you're almost making it for an audience of one."

I’m an Entertainment Writer here at GamesRadar+, covering everything film and TV-related across the Total Film and SFX sections. I help bring you all the latest news and also the occasional feature too. I’ve previously written for publications like HuffPost and i-D after getting my NCTJ Diploma in Multimedia Journalism.

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