The Running Man Behind The Scenes (2025) 4K

It's the biggest show in the country. Lust is our birthright. Set it free. Welcome to the running man. Hunt. Heroism. Useless. Obedience. Never. Freedom. No. Anarchy. When. Family. I had read the Richard Backman books when I was 14 and it really stayed with me. When I was a teenager I was a huge Stephen King fan. Still I'm a huge Stephen King fan. And I had read The Running Man before I'd seen the 1987 film. It's probably the first time I'd actually read a book that was drastically different from its film adaptation. And I'd always thought aloud for many years that it would be interesting to do a new adaptation of the book. More than 15 years ago I'd actually even looked into the rights which at that time were complicated and I'd stopped pursuing it. Cut to more than 10 years later the producer Simon Kinberg emails me and says, Do you have any interest in a new version of The Running Man? I said, I do actually. And so it was quite amazing. I didn't necessarily think that it was something that was going to happen. It was a surprise for it to come back to me. Our film, I wouldn't even call it a remake. And also I'm not really interested in remaking another film's tone and style and story. So this was a great opportunity to just adapt the book as if it was a new film. Started working on the adaptation with Michael Bacall. And we never say in the movie what year it is. We just kind of let it be. Maybe an alternate reality version of right now. But Stephen King wrote the book in 1982 and it's set in 2025. There are lots of things that he accurately predicted about the way the world was going. And the idea of there being one corporation that owns everything is obviously something that we all know now in reality. So the world of The Running Man, stop me if this sounds familiar, post-truth populists have taken over and enabled their techno-corporate overlords to essentially privatize the police, the military, no Medicare, no social security. And this is all run by a mono-monopoly called The Network. Their entertainment division is Free V. Are you man enough to risk it all? A perfect vector for their propaganda. The government are barely mentioned in the movie. The only thing you hear about is The Network. Don't worry. Daddy's not that crazy. And that was something that was very much in the book. But taking it a stage further of this idea of there being one channel. Everybody has great TVs but they're like mandated. Everybody has to have this TV in their house and they're all watching the same thing. They're in control of everything. The media, surveillance, your employment history, your medical history. Ben Richards, 35, married. Hired by C-Gen, fired for insubordination. The Network know everything that you're doing. They know probably more about you than maybe even you know. Which kind of feels a little real sometimes. We're basically in a world where you have this option to go on The Network and do one of these incredibly demeaning game shows that they have. That's where shows like The Running Man and Spin the Wheel, this hamster show, and Spank Bank, which I don't even want to know what that is, come into play. Spank Bank, Shark Rich, Bug Out. You have all these shows in which people who are desperate for money can sign up. So what happens is The Network is using the desperation of the poor in order to provide entertainment to the masses. A thousand new dollars. What's ironic about it is poor people are being entertained by how other poor people are getting the crap beat out of them. You know, when Stephen King wrote it, you can definitely parallel what's happening in the book with what's happening now. This is just a way more extreme version, which you need in stories. You need a more extreme version to understand, oh, he's talking about people with money controlling people with less money. Yes, it's always happened, but it's happening on a major scale now. Look, the lowest amount someone won today, 75 new dollars. No, no, people on that show never come back. All those sci-fis where you see when it was written and when it was written for. I'm like, oh, 2025. You know, I'm not too far off. Sheila, a night witch. This whole deepfake thing and AI. The way in which the government and reality TV. And you just go, okay. We wanted it to be an adaptation that was closer to the book than the prior adaptation. There are a couple things in particular. One was this idea that the game doesn't take place in an arena. The game board is the entire country. And the public, the audience of the game show, are participants. 13th and Obama. Hey, running man! Anyone can blow your cover at any time. Much like a World War II movie about, say, the French Resistance or something like that. You got to be nice, man, so people don't report you. Because people will do that. Not me, though, man. I'm a nice guy. No, you know what, you're right. If you trust the wrong person, it'll cost you your life. It's something that creates a lot of tension. Because you never know who might rat you out if you're a runner. Which I think makes it even more enticing for everybody. Just the interactive element of it. They're saying, if you video them, if you see them, we'll send you this amount of money. So it feels like a win-win situation. It's like we're all in this together. And nobody's ever gone through a season of The Running Man without perishing. But who better than Glenn Powell not to perish? Right now, I have Jen, a choreographer, who's making sure I walk on beat. To make sure that we have a proper walking sequence. So I've never been taught how to walk before, but that's what makes Edgar the best. Well done, team. Watching that back. Well done. I didn't realize how tough the walk would be. I thought I had rhythm. Turns out I don't. We'll see how it goes. I was really excited about the idea of Glenn doing the movie because he had this everyman quality. He feels very grounded. He feels like somebody that you know. But it's also interesting to take that charming persona and put them in a really difficult situation. Sick kid in my office. And Glenn with the very short fuse is very entertaining to watch. You know, I didn't bring her here to kill you. I brought her to stop myself from bouncing your face off this desk. And this is you, not angry? Ben is angry because Ben hates a bully. And I think this world that he finds himself in, it's not fair. Ben can't even get a job. This is a guy who wants to provide for his family, but he got blacklisted. And so there's a growing sense of frustration there. The system is against him. The character Ben in the book I think is a much darker individual than we've done in the adaptation. There's still a lot of anger in the character about the state of the world and the sense of injustice. It just makes him a very relatable, if complicated, hero. Authority. Burn. Justice. Hilarious. Family. Everything. I think Ben Richards represents all of us. In general, who we all want to be is someone who, when the people that we love are counting on us, we answer the call. Where's your sock? Oh, Ben, those take forever to make. No, no, it was on when we got home. Hold on. It's here. It's here. Those are her comfies, babe. Even before we started filming, when we had some prep time, the first thing Ben said was, this family is the heart of this movie. And it was really important to him and Edgar that they get this heartbeat right, so that we understand the journey he's about to go on. The other aspect of the book that we thought would be an interesting challenge to take on was the idea of staying with Ben for the run of the run, staying in his POV. It's not a film where you suddenly cut back to the baddies in the network headquarters. You're with Ben Richards 100% of the time, and all you see of the rest of the world is what he sees. The subjective nature of the point of view in this was really important, because I felt that that's what the novel is. The novel is entirely from Ben's point of view, and it felt like an incredibly intense experience because of it. So how do we maintain the advantage of that, which is putting the audience in a place where they feel like they're in the game with Ben, and reminding us of the real stakes here. Your feet smell like dead mice. I felt confident that if we did try to center this on Ben, talking about ideas on how to remind us of his family, remind us there's bad guys out there, without leaving Ben's perspective. People on this show never come back. Edgar had some imaginative ways of doing that. It's fun to work with Edgar because you see these elements start to come in, layering on top of the script and creating fantastic depth that can't always be on the page because it's a visual medium. The thing about Edgar Wright is that he gets the tone so spot on. He's taken what is a very dark book, very violent, grim subject matter, and I think made a really fun movie about it, if that isn't too much of a contradiction. But that's what I saw in the script. That's what I'm seeing every day on set. We're having such a great time making this movie, and I'm optimistic that that kind of spirit makes it onto the screen. Thank you for clicking on our video, everybody. If you like what you saw here, please make sure you like the video and subscribe and share with your friends who like this sort of content. JoBlo remains an independent company and we appreciate all of your support.