This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.Edgar Wright, the filmmaker and genre specialist who has given the world modern gems like Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and Baby Driver, estimates he was around 13 years old when he read “the Bachman Books,” a collection of four novels that Stephen King published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman during the early years of his career. Among those books was The Running Man, a dystopian thriller set in an economically ruined 2025. There a totalitarian U.S. government keeps the public distracted by constantly broadcasting a deadly TV game show.“I read The Running Man and was really bowled over by it,” Wright tells us during a break between sessions in the post-production of his own 2025 Running Man. “I had actually read the book before I saw the 1987 film. So even though I enjoyed the film, I was very aware that it was radically different from the book, and it’s probably the first time as both an avid reader and a film fan that I was really aware of how different an adaptation could be.”cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});The movie that Wright is referring to, 1987’s The Running Man, was very loosely inspired by King’s novel and starred Arnold Schwarzenegger. For his modern retelling, Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall have gone back to King’s source text, in which an unemployed construction worker named Ben Richards, desperate to find money for his family and medicine for his gravely ill daughter, volunteers to participate in the title game—a competition in which the “runner” must stay alive for 30 days while pursued anywhere in the world by government assassins known as Hunters. If Richards makes it to the end of the month, he’ll win a grand prize of $1 billion. If not, he’ll die trying.Wright is keen for the audience—whether it’s King devotees, fans of the first film, or just casual moviegoers—to know that his Running Man is not a remake of the 1987 cult classic, even as he hints they pay homage to the Schwarzenegger film in a couple of spots.“It’s clear, having done test screenings, that there are people who have neither read the book nor seen the 1987 film,” Wright says. “But when it first came to me, I wasn’t interested in doing a remake of the film because there wasn’t any sort of reason to do that. I think the reason to remake a film is if there’s something else in the material. So it was never going to be a scene-for-scene literal remake. It was always, in our heads, a new adaptation of the source material.”Meet The Running ManThis century’s Ben Richards is played by Glen Powell, the throwback movie star of such recent hits as Anyone But You, Hit Man, and Twisters. His natural charisma and everyman demeanor make him perfect to play the working-class, yet aggrieved, hero of King’s novel.“The important thing with Ben Richards is not that he isn’t tough,” Wright explains. “He’s an out-of-work construction worker, and we make it clear in the movie that he’s worked some of the toughest, shittiest jobs and worked outside a lot. So he’s capable, but he’s still not John Wick. He’s not a superhero. He’s a dad, and he’s kind of flying by the seat of his pants in the show. He’s on his heels for a lot of the movie, and I thought Glen was just perfect for that.”For Powell’s part, it was a veritable bucket list dream to work with the director of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.“He’s been one of my favorite filmmakers,” Powell says when we catch up with him on the road. “I made a list when I first moved out to Los Angeles, the guys that I would just kill to work with, and Edgar Wright was at the top of that list.”A few years back, Wright began following Powell on X, and the two eventually met for lunch in London. But it was after a second lunch in Los Angeles that the seeds for collaborating on The Running Man were sown.“I ended up running into the heads of Paramount at that same restaurant,” Powell recalls. “And they said, ‘What do you want to do? Who do you want to work with?’ And I said, ‘I was just hanging with Edgar Wright, and I would kill to work with him.’ And they’re like, ‘Are you being serious? Do you know about The Running Man? He’s putting that together, so that very much could be a thing,’ and I was like ‘very cool, that’s great.’”Powell says that Wright had been considering a few different actors for the role at the time but had not yet made up his mind when the Top Gun: Maverick breakout decided to give the filmmaker a little nudge.“I got down to the wire and sent him a really nice text just telling him why, if he hired me, there’d be no other actor that would ever work as hard and put his body on the line more than I would,” Powell says. “I meant it. So he took a shot on me and hired me for this movie.”Powell, while certainly sturdily built, is not exactly a Schwarzenegger—but Schwarzenegger was not exactly a Ben Richards either, who is described in the book as “scrawny” and ravaged by deprivation and poverty by the time he enrolls in the game.“Ben Richards is a guy who has a very short fuse and is engaged with the world and everything that’s happening with it on that short fuse,” says Powell. “He’s a bit of an angry guy, and they’re looking at him like, ‘This guy has a short temper and is angry with the world, therefore we can kind of take advantage of him and his situation and make sure that we get viewers riled up.’”But Powell notes that his character, as in the book, begins to realize that while he’s initially playing the game for the sake of his family, his ability to stay alive also begins to awaken a downtrodden and submissive public from its stupor. “His daughter’s very sick, potentially days away from dying, and he’s put in a position in which he will do anything to save his daughter’s life. So he’s a guy who’s trying to protect his own and then realizes that his situation is not unique, that everybody is struggling to make ends meet and protect their own, and that by winning this game, by surviving, he can be a symbol and a beacon of change—not just for his daughter’s future, but everybody’s future.”A World Just A Few Steps From OursLike The Long Walk, another recently released film adapted from a King/Bachman tale of dystopia, The Running Man feels eerily prescient for modern times. They both adapt novels that predicted TV dominating pop culture decades before the fact, the economic gap between the haves and the have-nots widening, and authoritarianism taking hold in the United States. Wright furthermore notes that both films will hopefully complement each other.“Even since we shot the movie, it has become more and more timely,” Powell says. “It is unbelievable how Stephen King saw the future of 2025, the year that we are in right now, and how eerie it is to see where we are living and what it looks like, and how similar it is to all the events that are happening in this book. This movie is obviously just cinematic escapism, and it’s fun and people are going to absolutely see it as just a blast of a movie experience, but what is incredibly fun is watching Stephen King the clairvoyant, and how we get to portray that, because it comments on a lot of things happening in the world.”Wright concurs with Powell’s remarks, pointing out the film has a satirical edge to it, even if it’s not an out-and-out comedy.“What’s crazy about the book is that it’s a pretty chilling prediction of where we’re at,” he muses. “And that in itself is quite disturbing, that things are presented in a very kind of blunt way. I’m really happy with how it works in the movie because it doesn’t seem so fanciful, and that’s what’s disturbing about it.”One aspect of King’s book that Wright finds especially interesting is how the author seemed to predict the pervasive growth of reality television and the extreme behavior certain strains of it have engendered over the years.“There has obviously been reality TV or forms of it going back to when the book was written,” the director says, “but I think since the book was written, there is so much TV that has swam in the same waters. And I think, also, people now are much more aware of how a TV show gets made and how manipulative reality TV is, and also how many lives are ruined in the process. Whether it’s Jerry Springer or Sally Jesse Raphael, or even American Idol or X Factor, or those other shows, they play fast and loose with the contestants’ lives and mental health. There have been lots of stories like that that bring the book into chilling relief.”In keeping with the quasi-realistic nature of those aspects of the book, the world of The Running Man, while set ostensibly in 2025, is positioned a few minutes into the future and just to the left of the real world in terms of its technology and culture—albeit, Wright notes, the film also taps into current trends that find people going back to analog technology in some ways. Curiously, Wright also admits that he had forgotten the novel was set in 2025 until this project came along.“I realized, ‘Oh, a film set in 2025 is going to come out in 2025, that’s sort of wild,’” he says. “We don’t say in the film what year it’s set in. What, hopefully, will be clear to viewers is that we’re in like an alternate 2025… There’s not much technology in the movie that doesn’t exist in some form now, but I think what tends to happen is that there is new technology out there that’s pretty advanced, but then it seems to fail when it gets to a consumer level. So our basic idea was that in the upper-class world, technological advancements have gotten better, and everywhere else, everything else has gotten worse.”Stephen King: Still RunningOne thing that seems timeless is the work of Stephen King himself. Following The Monkey, The Life of Chuck, and The Long Walk, The Running Man is the fourth feature film based on a King story or novel to come out in 2025. Although The Running Man was published in 1982, King actually wrote it a decade earlier, two years before his first novel Carrie was published, at a time when he and his wife Tabitha were still struggling to make ends meet while they and their kids were living in a trailer in Maine. King has famously said that he wrote The Running Man in a single week, blasting through the novel and perhaps projecting his anxieties—a fear that he could not provide for his wife and children, that he would be a failure—onto Ben Richards.“What’s really special about The Running Man is that it was [written] at a very specific moment in Stephen King’s life,” Powell considers. “A moment in which he was sort of feeling angry and powerless, very much like the underdog that Ben Richards is, and so that voice, that man against the system, really comes out in this book in a way that I think is indicative of where Stephen King was at during that moment in time. But what is so crazy is how timely it feels to everything that’s happening right now. It feels like the ordinary person is trying to do right in the world, and sometimes it can feel really unrewarding, and you can feel powerless and like you don’t know where to look or who to trust. I think a lot of that is in this story.”The Running Man is in theaters on Nov. 7.The post The Running Man: Edgar Wright and Glen Powell Talk Stephen King Dystopia in 2025 appeared first on Den of Geek.