The Running Man star Glen Powell says Edgar Wright's new Stephen King adaptation has similarities to Braveheart and Gladiator: "Ordinary people who are trying to make up for terrible things that have happened"

Glen Powell as Ben Richards in The Running Man

(Image credit: Paramount Pictures)

When you think of a dystopian action drama about a brutally dangerous competition with life-changing amounts of money at stake, your mind may not immediately go to, say, a historical epic. Glen Powell thinks about his new movie The Running Man slightly differently, though.

"One of the things that I would say is the structure of the movie is more like Braveheart and Gladiator," Powell tells GamesRadar+ when we sit down with him in London. "Like, ordinary people who are trying to save individual family members or make up for terrible things that have happened to family members and sort of end up getting pulled into a greater story where their problems aren't unique, and their sense of the world and how they're interacting with their world is... they're almost finding humanity in the inhumane."

Based on Stephen King's novel of the same name (first published in 1982 using the pseudonym Richard Bachman) and directed by Edgar Wright, the movie follows Powell's Ben Richards, an out-of-work father who desperately needs money to buy medicine for his sick daughter. Out of options, he ends up competing on the reality show The Running Man, where contestants can win $1 billion if they manage to evade a team of Hunters for 30 days. The catch? No one's ever managed it before…

Powell also says that 1976's Network was a point of reference for the movie, which makes sense considering Wright's comic background. "That was all about sort of the lengths that people go to," he explains. Sidney Lumet's comedy follows a struggling TV network which goes to extreme lengths to boost its viewership. "The dehumanization of human life and how a network will kind of do anything for ratings. That's definitely a tonal [comparison]."

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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