While Arnold Schwarzenegger’s adaptation of Stephen King’s dystopian sci-fi novel missed the book’s original point entirely in 1987, the true surprise is the fact that 2025’s remake of the same story barely fared any better. There are plenty of sci-fi movies that are worse than their books, since it can be tough to bring the immersive fictional worlds of the genre’s most ambitious novels to life faithfully onscreen. There are also various Stephen King books that have been deemed unfilmable for a variety of reasons, so a Stephen King sci-fi novel that didn’t work onscreen is hardly a surprise.
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However, it is still shocking that 1987’s adaptation of The Running Man was both a critical and commercial failure for star Arnold Schwarzenegger. Directed by, of all people, Starsky and Hutch star Paul Michael Glaser, The Running Man follows the story of a state-sponsored deadly televised game show wherein criminals are stalked by murderous assassins across America in a chase to the death. Schwarzenegger stars as an innocent, framed cop, Ben Richards, who is forced to compete in the game and eventually turns the tables on his attackers.
The Running Man Was Nowhere Near As Dark As Stephen King’s Original Novel
If this setup sounds familiar, that’s likely because The Running Man was neither the first nor the last dystopian sci-fi story to skewer mass media and fascist states with the tale of a televised death match. The classic B-movie Death Race 2000 followed a similar, albeit cartoonier, storyline 12 years before Schwarzenegger’s movie, while Battle Royale and The Hunger Games utilised similar plots in the 21st century. However, The Running Man’s 1987 movie adaptation was nowhere near as effective as these other dystopian action thrillers.
Although Schwarzenegger’s later sci-fi vehicle Total Recall also heavily altered its source material, that proved to be a smart idea. Director Paul Verhoeven’s movie had a lot to say about memory, digital doubling, and using entertainment as a panacea to ignore societal problems, and author Philip K. Dick’s source story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” was too short and sparse to address any of these themes in depth. However, King’s original novel The Running Man had plenty to say about class, inequality, and American media, and The Running Man failed to capitalise on its smart satire.
Even The Running Man’s Remake Couldn’t Live Up To King’s Sci-fi Book
In the book, Richards volunteers for the deadly game as he is too poor to provide for his family in any other way, and he ends the story by blowing up the TV network’s headquarters, killing himself and the villains in a downbeat act of deadly defiance. By making Schwarzenegger’s protagonist a framed cop who successfully defeats the villains and becomes a national hero, 1987’s movie completely defanged this barbed satirical commentary and turned the story into just another Schwarzenegger sci-fi movie.
While director Edgar Wright’s 2025 remake of The Running Man stuck much closer to the source material, that adaptation struggled with another issue. By the time the Glen Powell vehicle was released in 2025, viewers had seen a deluge of media about ordinary antiheroes getting violent vengeance on the uber-rich in recent years. Thanks to Saltburn, Death of a Unicorn, The Menu, Joker, Parasite, the Knives Out movies, the Ready or Not movies, and many, many more, The Running Man’s class-conscious satire no longer felt anywhere near daring or innovative.
