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.
"What we settled on very early, in terms of talking about the adaptation, is a different way of doing it that still has the same fire. It needed to kind of have the same spirit of the book, but in a different way," he tells GamesRadar+.
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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.
"What was very gratifying to me is Stephen King had to sign off on the adaptation, so there was a point in the production where we had to send him the script to get his approval, and he loved the script, and he said, 'I think you did a great job with the ending,'" Wright continues.
"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."
The Running Man arrives in theaters on November 12 in the UK and November 14 in the US. For more, check out our guide to the rest of this year's biggest movie release dates.
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