The remake of The Running Man has gotten an incredibly positive update. The original 1987 movie, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, was based on the 1982 novel of the same name by Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman) and follows a game show where criminals must fight for their lives to earn a government pardon. The remake was announced in 2021, with Scott Pilgrim director Edgar Wright at the helm and Michael Bacall writing the screenplay. It was also announced that the remake would be produced by Simon Kinberg, Audrey Chon, and Nira Park.
SlashFilm recently sat down for an interview with Simon Kinberg in honor of the new season of his sci-fi show Invasion. However, their conversation also touched on the topic of the Running Man remake. Kinberg shared his enthusiasm for working with Edgar Wright and the fact that “we are working on it actively,” offering up the hope that “Edgar could maybe direct next year.” Read his full quote below:
Yeah, he’s one of my favorite directors of all time and one of my favorite people, just a super great guy. Obviously a cinephile. We are working on it actively. He’s actively working on the script with Michael Bacall. And our hope would be that it is a movie that, again, all fingers crossed and luck and everything else go our way, that Edgar could maybe direct next year… What’s cool is that Edgar, completely separately, before myself and Paramount started down the journey of figuring out how to get the remake rights, which was complicated, he had tweeted, just on his own — and I follow him obviously on every possible platform — he had tweeted that if there was one movie he would remake ever, it was Running Man.
The Time is Ripe for a The Running Man Remake
Competitive dystopian stories like the Schwarzenegger The Running Man are relatively common throughout the history of modern fiction. In fact, King’s 1982 book was the second time he wrote about such themes under the Richard Bachman pseudonym after his 1979 title The Long Walk, which followed teenagers put through a deadly competition where they are killed if their speed drops below 4 miles per hour too many times. The stories for both novels also bear somewhat loose similarities to an even earlier classic, the 1948 Shirley Jackson short story “The Lottery.”
In the years since The Running Man, its particular dystopian format has come even more into vogue. This is especially apparent in the success of The Hunger Games and the Japanese import Battle Royale, both of which pit teens against one another in fights to the death in movie franchises adapted from novels. In fact, a new Hunger Games movie, the prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, is due to come out in November.
The remake of The Running Man could perform very well in the wake of these titles, and it also comes during a very fertile period for Stephen King adaptations. 2017’s It and 2019’s It: Chapter Two were both among the highest-grossing movies of their respective years, indicating a continuing strong interest in his older works. Other King-adapted titles such as The Boogeyman, The Outsider, Doctor Sleep, Gerald’s Game, and Pet Sematary have also received critical or commercial acclaim in the past five years.
