Edgar Wright’s The Running Man has been in development since 2021, but the unpredictable nature of the film industry has delayed the project. The good news is that the film is still in the works, and producer Simon Kinberg provided an update on its current status during a recent interview with Slash Film.
“[Wright is] actively working on the script with Michael Bacall. And our hope would be that it is a movie that, again, all fingers crossed and luck and everything else go our way, that Edgar could maybe direct next year… What’s cool is that Edgar, completely separately, before myself and Paramount started down the journey of figuring out how to get the remake rights, which was complicated, he had tweeted, just on his own — and I follow him obviously on every possible platform — he had tweeted that if there was one movie he would remake ever, it was The Running Man.”
The Running Man is based on a novel by Stephen King (under his Richard Bachman alias). Set in a dystopian future, it tells the story of a hard-on-his-luck man who participates in a government-sanctioned death game to make ends meet. A film version starring Arnold Schwarzenegger was released in 1987, which amps up the action and reimagines the protagonist as a cop who gets jailed for a murder he didn’t commit. It’s a great bit of silly fun, but it’s somewhat of a departure from the tone of King’s original book.
It’ll be interesting to see how Wright and Bacall handle the remake. Will it be another action movie or more in line with King’s bleak sci-fi vision? The anti-establishment/socially conscious themes of The Running Man are certainly topical today, and Wright has a great track record for making quality genre films. What’s more, it’s been a passion project for the British director for quite some time, and that goes a long way.
