Stephen King in conversation with Edgar Wright
“When I wrote The Running Man, 2025 seemed so far in the future”
In a prolific year for adaptations of Stephen King’s work, Edgar Wright, director of The Running Man, discusses the themes of media manipulation, the appeal of genre storytelling, and how reality has caught up with fiction since the novella was written.
“Welcome to America in 2025 when the best men don’t run for president. They run for their lives…”
This tagline appeared on the original book jacket of The Running Man, depicting a dystopian future where a government-run TV network controls the public through a violent gameshow. Although published in 1982, King wrote the story a decade earlier under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.
The novella gained more recognition in 1985 through The Bachman Books, a collection that also included Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), and Roadwork (1981). In 1987, Arnold Schwarzenegger starred as the protagonist Ben Richards in Paul Michael Glaser’s loose film adaptation, which preserved the deadly gameshow concept but changed much of the original story.
Despite Hollywood's often slow pace, Edgar Wright’s more faithful adaptation is releasing in the very year the novel imagined—2025—once considered a distant future by King.
Summary
Stephen King's The Running Man, written as Richard Bachman, portrays a dystopian 2025 where media manipulation controls society, and Edgar Wright’s new film brings this vision to life with remarkable fidelity.