Edgar Wright Dares To Rewrite The Running Man’s Ending — With Stephen King’s Blessing
Running Man gets a new finale as its creator gives the green light.
Edgar Wright is making The Running Man, but if you were bracing for Stephen King’s famously brutal ending, you can unclench. He’s not doing it. King knows it. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed off on it. And yes, Glen Powell is the new Ben Richards. Let’s unpack.
The book’s ending is pure nightmare fuel
Quick refresher if you skipped the Bachman-era stuff: in King’s 1982 novel, Ben Richards enters a deadly TV spectacle hoping to pull his wife and daughter out of poverty. By the final pages, he learns they’ve been killed anyway. With nothing left to lose, he hijacks a plane and rams it into the network that broadcasts the show, wiping out himself and his tormentors in one last middle finger to the system. It’s bleak, operatic, and absolutely not the vibe of an Edgar Wright finale.
Wright isn’t using that ending — and that was the plan from day one
Wright told Film Stories that everyone involved knew the book’s closer wasn’t happening in this version. And this wasn’t some surprise sprung on the author at the eleventh hour. King — who originally published The Running Man under his Richard Bachman pen name — was looped in early and already understood that the adaptation would diverge when it counted.
"I was very curious how you were going to tackle the ending, and I think you did a great job."
That’s King’s emailed verdict on Wright’s approach, according to Wright — pretty much the green light you want when you’re tinkering with a classic. Changing King can be a minefield; getting the man’s thumbs-up helps.
The Schwarzenegger shadow, and a friendly blessing
There’s already a movie called The Running Man — the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger version — and it’s wildly different from the novel. Still, that gold-jumpsuit image is hard to shake for a lot of people. Wright and Powell know they’re living in that shadow, so they went straight to the source. Powell says he rang up Arnold back in April, and the icon gave them his full blessing. Powell also teased that they’re sending Schwarzenegger a specific little gift from this new movie — a wink-wink that we’ll apparently hear about soon.
The new film even tips its hat in the trailer: Schwarzenegger pops up as a president on a dollar bill. Nice touch.
Where this leaves the new movie
Wright’s take is a futuristic action film led by Powell (yes, Hangman from Top Gun: Maverick) as Ben Richards. It pulls from King’s darker world but steers away from the book’s kamikaze ending — by design, not by fear — with both King and Schwarzenegger giving it the go-ahead.
The Running Man hits theaters on November 7 as part of the 2025 slate. We’ll see if Wright’s remix can outrun both the source’s nihilism and the 80s neon of it all.