The Running Man is available to rent and will soon stream on Paramount+. It had a theatrical release on November 14, 2025.
By Elazar Abrahams
As we enter the new year, I find myself with a large backlog of articles that still need to be written. See, I got married in September, and while 2025 was incredible because of that, it also meant that TV and City took a backseat. That’s valid, but there’s so much great entertainment out there that deserves to be shared with our readers. On top of that, I also accepted screeners and press tickets for a number of projects. Those perks come with the expectation that this site will be covering them, and I feel quite bad about that. Many of the shows and movies have long since premiered, and the theatrical productions closed as scheduled. Still, it feels only right to sit down, put pen to paper, and get these pieces out into the world. Let’s hope 2026 will bring more great times and excuses, and more good art into all our lives.
One of those coveted early screenings I attended was The Running Man, directed by Edgar Wright and based on the Stephen King novel. It’s a much more loyal adaptation than the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle.
There is a version of The Running Man that could have felt dangerous. The premise, after all, is not subtle: a near-future society turns human suffering into mass entertainment, and the public consumes it like a sporting event. It’s one of those concepts that practically begs for sharp satire, because you can draw a straight line from “televised manhunt” to half the way we already treat public life.
Edgar Wright’s 2025 adaptation, based on the Stephen King novel, mostly chooses something else. It chooses fun.
That is not an insult. The Running Man is a good time at the movies. It moves, it has energy, the action is solid, and Glenn Powell is genuinely great in the lead role as Ben Richards. If you’ve been waiting for Powell to get the kind of vehicle that cements him as a real-deal movie star, this is one of those “oh yeah, there it is” performances. He has the charisma, the physical confidence, and the likability to sell a big studio thriller even when the material around him doesn’t always sparkle.
The setup is straightforward. Richards gets thrown into a deadly televised game where survival is content and the machinery of entertainment is baked into the violence. The movie leans hard into the spectacle side, and when it’s in that lane, it works. Wright knows how to keep a sequence moving, how to stage action with clarity, and how to make a mainstream movie feel brisk instead of bloated.
The problem is that the script’s attempts at satire and political commentary feel corny, safe, and weirdly unpointed. The film wants to say something about media manipulation, sensationalism, and the moral rot of a culture that watches suffering for fun. Fine. Those are real ideas. But the way the movie expresses them is so broad that it lands like a bumper sticker. “The media is bad.” “The media is untrustworthy.” It’s commentary that feels designed to offend absolutely nobody, which is kind of hilarious given how provocative the premise is supposed to be.
And when the satire is toothless, it makes the whole story feel lighter than it should. That doesn’t kill the movie, because the entertainment value is still there, but it does hold it back from being great. The film has the outline of something sharper, and you can feel it playing it safe instead of committing to a real perspective.
The other issue is structural. The third act gets messy, and the ending is even messier. It’s not that the film collapses, but it starts to feel like it’s juggling too many ideas at once and rushing toward a finish line without landing its big swings cleanly. The result is a final stretch that loses some of the movie’s earlier momentum, which is frustrating because the first two-thirds are doing a pretty good job at being exactly what they are, a slick, crowd-pleasing studio thriller.
Still, I don’t want to undersell what works. As a piece of mainstream entertainment, The Running Man delivers. Powell is the real asset, the action is solid, and the movie has enough forward motion to keep you engaged even when the social commentary feels like it’s been sanded down for maximum mass appeal.
I had fun with it. I just wanted it to be nastier, sharper, and more confident in what it was trying to say.
I give The Running Man a B.
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