Glen Powell to Star in The Running Man Remake

Glen Powell has been a part of many legacy sequels and remakes throughout his career. The Top Gun: Maverick star brought Twister back with the 2024 film Twisters, and he even managed to resurrect the box office romantic comedy with the 2023 film Anyone But You. He is the kind of actor that people put in their movies because they know that he is going to bring the 80s action star energy that films need. Casting him in a reimagining of an Arnold Schwarzenegger classic was not a surprising choice.

Schwarzenegger is the kind of actor who has characters or movies people instantly associate with him. If you are a Stephen King fan, you might remember the bad adaptation of King’s 1982 novel, The Running Man. Written under his pen name Richard Bachman, the novel set up a society that allowed people to play games for money. Those game shows were not exactly Family Feud. The Network allowed people to play to the death to try and set their families up for life. Games like The Running Man allowed hunters to come after contestants for a month straight. If you survived, you were set. The catch was that the Network and society were watching, making it almost impossible for anyone to survive. We now have Edgar Wright’s adaptation of the King novel to really highlight what The Running Man is all about.

In the 1987 movie directed by Paul Michael Glaser and written by Steven E. de Souza, the film felt like both Glaser and de Souza had a vague understanding of King’s book and that was it. Maybe they just read the synopsis. It barely scratched the surface of King’s novel. It did have fun cameos, like Mick Fleetwood and actual Family Feud host Richard Dawson, but other than that, the movie was just another way of showing how cool Schwarzenegger was. That is not a bad thing if you have never read King’s work. Once you know what actually happens to Ben Richards, the Schwarzenegger movie looks like no one involved bothered to read the story they were trying to adapt.

A Better Adaptation

Ben Richards is a father who volunteers himself to the Network to try to get money for medicine for his daughter Cathy. His wife, Sheila (Jayme Lawson), tries her best to work as much as possible since Ben got banned from working, but the family struggles to make ends meet. When Ben hears an ad for the Network, he goes to put in for one of the easier games to make enough to get Cathy what she needs. The Network sees the anger that Ben has and decides that he is best fit for one game only: The Running Man.

All of that was left out of the Schwarzenegger adaptation. He simply gets arrested and is thrown into the game. That is an element of the source material, but it is not Ben Richards’ story at all. Ben’s desire to survive is rooted in his family. It is not really clear why Schwarzenegger’s Ben wants to beat the game other than righting a wrong. Powell’s Ben is always thinking about his wife and daughter, which carries him throughout the movie.

The Schwarzenegger movie had the players in an arena, and it was not the worldwide manhunt that the book and 2025 film featured. A lot of the 1987 film took the idea of fighting for your life without following the plot or structure of the novel. The 2025 film took a departure when it came to the ending, leaving King’s darker final moments for a more hopeful turn, but otherwise the film was relatively spot on with what King wrote.

The Money of It All Is Tricky

The tricky thing when talking about The Running Man is the money the film made. Wright’s adaptation cost more to make in the modern era. The 1987 film cost $27 million, which with today’s inflation would be around $80 million if it were made the same way. Wright’s version cost $110 million. The Schwarzenegger box office numbers adjusted for inflation would be around the cost of Wright’s movie, but the 2025 film only made $69.5 million worldwide. There are many factors for this that should be taken into consideration, like lower movie theater turnout in general and the introduction of Rotten Tomatoes ratings that did not exist in 1987.

If you look at Rotten Tomatoes, Powell’s take on Ben Richards is more of a success than Schwarzenegger’s, with a 61% critic score and an audience rating of 77%, about 10 points higher than the original film’s score. The 2025 version of The Running Man may not be the smash hit it deserved to be, but it is leagues better than the Schwarzenegger film in every way.

Source: Polygon