The Running Man (2025) Trailer: Action, Satire, and Survival

Paramount Pictures has released the new trailer for The Running Man (2025), directed by Edgar Wright. This latest take on Stephen King’s dystopian thriller was published under his pen name, Richard Bachman, in 1982. This time around, fans of the author will get a glimpse of Wright’s unique take on the source material. He’ll be offering an adaptation closer in spirit to King’s darkly comic novel than 1987’s action-packed film.

Stephen King first wrote and published several works under the name Richard Bachman in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His alter ego was exposed in 1984 after a careful researcher made some connections between Bachman and King. Among those King/Bachman works, perhaps the most well-known is The Running Man, a novel that King reportedly churned out in just one week.

Like the film, the book is set in a dystopian United States in the year 2025 (coincidentally, the year that the film will be released in). The United States in 2025 has become totalitarian and economically bankrupt. As a substitute for dwindling free press, the nation’s most popular television program is also its most vicious. The Running Man is a game show where contestants called Runners are hunted down by teams of professional assassins known as Hunters, and the whole thing is televised for a national audience with a sick appetite for violence and voyeurism.

The story centers on a man named Ben Richards, who works and lives with his wife and terminally ill daughter in an area known as “Co-Op City.” After being blacklisted from the formal economy, Richards takes a dangerous gamble and signs up for the most popular television program in the country.

As a Runner, he is branded as an enemy of the state, given 12 12-hour head start, and left to run. As he is pursued by the Hunters and all of his family is under constant threat of execution by the state, Richards is forced to fight like never before just to stay alive. The premise is simple: if a Runner can evade the Hunters for 30 days, they win $1 billion. The odds are against them: the record for the most time survived is a mere 197 hours. If the contestant is killed, their survivors are paid for every Hunter they kill, and every day they manage to stay alive adds up in prize money. It’s a grim incentive to keep going for desperate people.

The reality show becomes a game of cat and mouse across the ravaged country. Ben Richards, however, does better than anyone has in history—but for fans of King’s work, happy endings don’t come easily.

In 1987, The Running Man was adapted into a film by action star Arnold Schwarzenegger. It kept the basic idea of the television program but went in a more science-fiction direction and, perhaps as a product of its time, leaned harder into cliched ’80s action tropes. The humor was replaced with camp, and Schwarzenegger’s Ben Richards is far removed from King’s original creation. In the novel, Richards is described as “scrawny” and “pre-tubercular.” Ben Richards had a yearning to survive, but mostly the film had a yearning for the song of the same name by George Jackson.

Wright, who has made a name for himself by making inventive comedies including Shaun of the Dead, Baby Driver, and most recently Last Night in Soho, has been associated with The Running Man for quite some time. In 2017, Wright told The A.V. Club that he was developing an adaptation of the book and could “finally” get someone to fund the project. He then officially joined the project in 2021, with Paramount giving it the green light. Wright also announced that he would be working with a new writing partner on the project. Michael Bacall will be joining Wright on the script.

Ben has an early lead as the contestant, earning popularity with the masses. Fans start to turn on the inhumane regime as Richards is increasingly regarded as a hero. Lee Pace, Jayme Lawson, Colman Domingo, Michael Cera, and William H. Macy all make appearances in various roles. Josh Brolin plays the show’s amoral host, Dan Killian, and Jayme Lawson plays Ben’s wife Sheila. Colman Domingo plays the boisterous game show host Bobby Thompson. Michael Cera is also set to play a role as the rebel Bradley Throckmorton.

There’s More Bachman To Come

Fans of King and his Bachman work will have another dystopian competition film to look forward to in 2025. The Long Walk, another of King’s Bachman novels, is also set to have a big-screen adaptation in 2025. The book, which King wrote in 1979, has had its fair share of bumps before production had even begun, including a 2022 announcement that Ana Lily Amirpour had been cast to direct, only to be pulled from the job over her issues with antisemitism. The film is currently set to open on September 12, 2025, while The Running Man is slated for November 7 of that year.

In both The Running Man and The Long Walk, King writes about a dystopian future where human contestants are put into a state of duress as part of a televised competition. The spectacles serve as government-run blood sports where empathy is driven out of the people as they watch the games for months on end.

Fans will have a lot to look forward to, but it seems that 2025 might be a sobering year of reflection on the intersections between entertainment, capitalism, and common decency.