The Running Man is one of Stephen King’s most beloved novels an now Edgar Wright and Michael Bacall are promising a more faithful adaptation to King’s work with the new 2025 film starring Glen Powell. And King had a say in the film. Sort of.
During New York Comic Con’s panel for The Running Man, Powell talked about the process of getting cast as Ben Richards, a man running for his life on a game show. Ben volunteers himself for the show called “The Running Man” to try to make money for his sick daughter and he’s forced to run away from hunters to get them the money they need for medicine.
Powell shared that while Wright offered him the role as Ben, who Arnold Schwarzenegger played in the 1987 adaptation, it wasn’t a sure thing. First, King himself had to approve of Powell. “Edgar offered me this movie, and I was like, ‘Yes.’ I’m like, ‘Let’s go…’ And then, like, later that night [Edgar says], ‘By the way, like, you have to be approved by Stephen King. He’s gonna watch Hit Man tonight,” Powell said on stage. “And so I had to wait overnight for Stephen King to watch Hit Man and hope that I still had the role in the morning. It’s terrible,” he said. Good news for us all, King has taste and he loved Hit Man.
Stephen King and I have a love of Hit Man in common
Obviously, Powell won King over with his work in the Richard Linklater film. And that’s something I can say that I have in common with the prolific author. The 2024 film was fascinating for a lot of reasons. Not only was Powell playing a real man, who would trick people trying to hire a hit man, but he also co-wrote the screenplay with Linklater.
Frankly, it is one of the biggest snubs of last year’s award season, in my humble opinion. Linklater and Powell should have an Oscar nomination for their work on that screenplay. But the movie itself is a perfect audition reel for Powell as an actor.
He’s playing a lot of different types of “hit men” characters and look, I am someone who has written at length about Powell’s impression of Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman. But I do think it is funny that I have concrete evidence that Stephen King and I share an opinion.
(featured image: John Nacion/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures)
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