This article contains slight spoilers for The Running Man.The 1987 movie The Running Man may be a delightfully weird bit of Arnold Schwarzenegger cheese, but it doesn’t have much to do with the 1982 novel that Stephen King published under the pen name Richard Bachman. For his 2025 adaptation, Edgar Wright has tried to stick closer to the source material, but he couldn’t resist winking to his predecessor.Early in the new movie, Bobby T (Colman Domingo), the charismatic host of the television show The Running Man, tells protagonist Ben Richards (Glen Powell) and his fellow contestants Laughlin (Katy O’Brian) and Jansky (Martin Herlihy) about the huge cash rewards they win for each day they stay alive. To illustrate the point, one of the women on stage flashes a handful of highly-coveted new dollars, each emblazoned with Arnold’s image.“I thought it was a nice little nod,” Wright admitted to The Hollywood Reporter, in which he also recalled his admiration to the 1987 movie. “[Co-writer] Michael Bacall had written the idea about a new currency, ‘new dollars,’ into the script.” While Wright intended to cameo to be a nod to the previous version of The Running Man, he also notes that the fact that Arnold is portraying a president references a different beloved movie from the era. “It’s a shared joke with the Demolition Man universe,” he explained; “In Demolition Man, they mention President Schwarzenegger, so it’s my little shout out to both Arnie and Daniel Waters [screenwriter of Demolition Man].”In the 1987 movie, Schwarzenegger played a very different type of Ben Richards than the man portrayed by Powell. In addition to his greater size and signature accent, Schwarzenegger’s Richards is a former cop who ended up on the deadly gameshow as part of his punishment for refusing to kill rioters. Most of this Richard’s battles take place in an arena, where he goes one-on-one against outsize personalities such as Captain Freedom (Jesse Ventura) and Fireball (Jim Brown).cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Despite his fondness for the Schwarzenegger movie, Wright wanted his version to more closely follow the novel, if only because it allowed his film to be fresh and different. “The best remakes of films or the best new adaptations are where you’re doing something radically different with it. David Cronenberg’s The Fly is a great example. It’s wildly different to the 1958 one, but I can enjoy both,” he explained. “This felt like a fresh movie because the source material hadn’t been fully adapted, and most of the characters in the book are not in the 1987 film.”And so Wright’s movie brings in King characters missing from the movie, most notably Michael Cera as nerdy revolutionary Elton Parrakis and Daniel Ezra as rebel and critical theorist Bradley Throckmorton. Moreover, Wright tries to retain more of the bleak anger of King’s novel, to varying degrees of success. But even then, he can’t help but share some love with the Schwarzenegger Running Man, even if it’s just high-dollar cameo.The Running Man is now playing in theaters.The post Edgar Wright Explains That Creative Running Man Cameo appeared first on Den of Geek.