US EditionThe Running Man Might Be the New Jewel in Glen Powell’s Cinema Legacy
The film explores a lethal game show exploiting a desperate underclass, highlighting income inequality and media manipulation in a dystopian near future.
- Edgar Wright's The Running Man will be released only in theaters on November 14, featuring Glen Powell as Ben Richards in a deadly 30-day game for $1billion.
- Ben Richards, desperate for medicine, auditions for the Free-Vee Network’s cruel game shows as economic inequality and scarce healthcare push him to risk his life for his sick toddler.
- Dan Killian, media mogul , selects Richards as a fall guy while Free-Vee Network producers collude using deepfakes and Hunters who execute captured players live on air.
- Reviewers note the film plays the story more straight for roughly the first two-thirds but say the film's final act feels rushed and pieced together, undermining a clear resolution.
- The film foregrounds media manipulation, bread-and-circuses distractions, and collective action against predatory billionaires amid Edgar Wright's $110million Hollywood ambitions.
17 Articles
17 Articles
The Running Man runs out of steam
After a spectacularly bad few weeks for the box office – with only the Predator sequel overperforming, probably because it was rated PG-13 – Paramount is no doubt eyeing the release of their Edgar Wright/Stephen King/Glen Powell would-be blockbuster The Running Man with unusual trepidation. As well they might. Although it has been marketed as an all-action thriller in the vein of the studio’s Mission: Impossible films, it comes with the slight a…
Movie Review: Righteously Angry 'The Running Man' Concept Squandered on Too Handsome Glen Powell
Dom Sinacola by Dom Sinacola Written under his Richard Bachman pseudonym, Stephen King’s novel The Running Man was first published in 1982; it describes the malicious future of 2025. King imagines that a massive authoritarian media conglomerate has a functional monopoly on all of American culture. To distract from its greed and incompetence, the quasi-governmental entity has replaced the country’s health care system, already strained by vast eco…
Where was Edgar Wright in the Stephen King adaptation The Running Man?
So how, then, to explain The Running Man, Wright’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 1982 novel about a predatory, lethal game show? For roughly the first two-thirds of its running time (so to speak), Wright’s version of The Running Man plays the story straight — at least, more surface-level and sincere than his best movies, which typically bring the audience in on the joke early and often. And then the film goes entirely off the rails, to the point …
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