The Running Man Trailer Hews Closer to King than Schwarzenegger
Glen Powell is stepping into the biggest action hero shoes in the world. Today, Paramount Pictures released a trailer for The Running Man, a new adaptation of a Stephen King book (written under his old Richard Bachman pseudonym) and a remake of the 1987 film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Powell stars as Ben Richards, an out-of-work husband and father who reluctantly signs up for a reality TV show called The Running Man, where he will run throughout the country being hunted by trained killers for cash while aerial cameras film his journey. Josh Brolin, Colman Domingo, Jayme Lawson, Michael Cera, Lee Pace, David Zayas, Sean Hayes, and William H. Macy co-star with Powell. Directed by Edgar Wright from a script by Wright and Michael Bacall, The Running Man will arrive in theaters on November 7, 2025, and you can see the trailer below:
Against all odds – meaning despite that it’s a remake of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie and, therefore, treading on sacred ground – I’m interested in seeing the new version of The Running Man. I love the Arnold film, which is an underrated entry in his filmography and features great action and some classic Arnold one-liners (“Here is Subzero; now… plain zero!”), plus perhaps the only time the villain had an epic response to Arnold’s classic “I’ll be back.” (I won’t dare ruin this one in case you haven’t seen it.) The 1987 film also had the genius idea of casting perhaps the most famous game show host of all time, Richard Dawson, as the villain, the evil host of The Running Man, Damon Killian. And, as with many dismissed action movies, it was smarter than it was given credit for being, using its sci-fi setting to comment on reality TV and the audience’s fascination with degradation, a lying fake news media that acted as the propaganda arm of a fascistic government, a surveillance state, digital manipulation to make people believe they saw things they didn’t, and more. (Of course, Arnold makes them pay for all that commie nonsense.) But the rub is that I also like Stephen King’s book a lot, and the two stories are very different, albeit with some of the same ideas and themes, so I’m interested in seeing a closer adaptation of King’s story, which I can tell this will be from the Running Man trailer.
Aside from all that baggage (which, since I’m looking forward to it, is positive baggage; I guess I packed light), the Running Man trailer looks like a lot of fun. I like the peeks at the action and the grimy look of the sci-fi future world – which, to be fair, is something the Arnold movie captured as well. Arnold’s Ben Richards was a bachelor (all the better for him to romance Maria Conchita Alonzo), but Glen Powell’s Richards, much like the one in the book, is a family man in dire straits, with a sick daughter who needs medical attention Richards and his wife can’t afford, which leads to him agreeing to be a constant on The Running Man. The locations are ones from the book as well, like seedy apartment buildings and back alleys, as opposed to the cordoned-off sections of the city used in the previous film. The trailer showcases the more entertaining aspects of the movie, but I hope it also captures the air of dread and hopelessness that permeates the book, something the 1987 adaptation lacked, if only because we knew Arnold was gonna destroy the bad guys. (I mean, it was all in the epic tagline: “A game nobody survives… but Schwarzenegger has yet to play.”) That’s how you make a new version work, aside from sticking closer to the book: you play up the fact that Glen Powell is more of an everyman than the superhuman Arnold. And I’d really love for them to keep the epic, ballsy ending from the book, and a particular scene from the trailer suggests they just may. My hope is that I’ll be happy to put these two films on one of my many movie shelves side by side, and the Running Man trailer makes me think I will be.
Let us know what you think of the Running Man trailer in the comments!
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