The former star of a 1980s Stephen King cult sci-fi movie has endorsed the new adaptation. This has been a great year for Stephen King fans, and there is still one more movie on the way. When new King movies are announced, his fans often get anxious because they are not always guaranteed to follow his books closely enough for many people’s tastes. For every Misery, which follows his book closely and only makes minor changes to make it work better as a movie, there is a movie like The Shining. That remains one of the best horror movies of all time, but even King hates the film because of how it changed his story.
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Another movie that adapted a King story, but didn’t follow his themes at all, was a sci-fi film released in the 1980s, and it has an adaptation coming this month. On November 14, The Running Man hits theaters, and from the sound of it, Stephen King fans have nothing to worry about. This should have been a given since director Edgar Wright has always been respectful of the genres he works in, and his Stephen King adaptation is no different. In an interview with Screen Rant, star Glen Powell revealed that Arnold Schwarzenegger, who starred in the 1987 version of the movie, said it was “the first time Stephen’s vision has been properly adapted.”
Impressively, Stephen King also loves The Running Man, which is nice to hear since he rarely holds back when one of his movies is bad. “I’ve seen it and it’s fantastic,” King wrote on social media. “DIE HARD for our time. A bipartisan thrill ride.”
The Running Man Is Expected To Be Loyal To Stephen King’s Vision
The Arnold Schwarzenegger version of The Running Man was a cult sci-fi movie from the ’80s, but it had little to do with the source material. King wrote The Running Man under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, which makes the new version of the movie the second to hit theaters this year from that pseudonym, following The Long Walk. According to Schwarzenegger, like The Long Walk, The Running Man looks to play it very close to the themes from King’s original novel.
Edgar Wright broke out thanks to his zombie movie Shaun of the Dead. While made as a comedy, it was respectful of the zombie genre and its many conventions. He was so respectful that he earned George A. Romero’s respect in return. Romero ended up inviting Wright and star Simon Pegg to have a cameo in his next zombie movie, Land of the Dead. Wright also directed one of the best buddy cop movies of all time, Hot Fuzz, which, once again, had comedic undertones but never mocked beloved action-movie beats.
The closest someone can come to a comparison is when Wright directed Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, which was based on a beloved cult comic book series. If he got that wrong, fans would have destroyed the director. However, he got it right, paid the proper respect to the comic, and still told an entertaining story in a movie that might be one of the best “video game movies” of all time, even though it isn’t based on a video game. This should make Stephen King fans more comfortable about the upcoming adaptation of The Running Man.
The Running Man tells the story of Ben Richards, a man who agrees to take part in the reality TV series The Running Man, where if he survives 30 days while being hunted by professional assassins, he would win a massive cash award. The original movie had Ben as a prisoner forced to compete in the games. The change here is that Ben is a family man who wants the money to help pay for his daughter’s medical bills. The rest of the cast includes names like Josh Brolin, Colman Domingo, Lee Pace, Michael Cera, and William H. Macy.
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Image courtesy of Lucasfilm.
