Stephen King in conversation with Edgar Wright: “When I wrote The Running Man, 2025 seemed so far in the future that I couldn’t even grasp it in my mind”

Stephen King in Conversation with Edgar Wright

In a year marked by numerous screen adaptations of Stephen King’s work, Edgar Wright, director of The Running Man, a dystopian thriller about a violent TV gameshow, discusses with King themes of media manipulation, the appeal of genre storytelling, and the striking closeness of today's reality to his fictional future, written over fifty years ago.

The Vision of 2025 in The Running Man

The original book jacket tagline of Stephen King’s The Running Man read:

“Welcome to America in 2025 when the best men don’t run for president. They run for their lives…”

The novella envisions a dystopian future where a government-controlled television network pacifies citizens using a brutal gameshow. Although the story was first published in 1982, King wrote it a decade earlier under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. It gained renewed recognition in 1985 as part of The Bachman Books collection, which included other early novellas such as Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979) and Roadwork (1981).

Screen Adaptations and Legacy

Two years after the collection’s release, a loose film adaptation directed by Paul Michael Glaser featured Arnold Schwarzenegger as Ben Richards, King's everyman protagonist. Though it preserved the deadly gameshow premise, it diverged significantly from the source material.

Despite often slow Hollywood production timelines, Edgar Wright’s version strives for a more faithful adaptation, debuting in the very year King originally envisioned—2025.

King Reflects on Writing the Novel

“When I wrote The Running Man, 2025 seemed so far in the future that I couldn’t even grasp it in my mind.”

Author’s Summary

Stephen King and Edgar Wright explore how The Running Man has gained new relevance as today’s world increasingly mirrors the dystopian future King imagined decades ago.

BFI — 2025-11-07