Planned release date November 7, 2025.
I just hope its not the dumpster fire that the '87 release was. I had already read the book and was stoked for the movie. Even more-so with Arnold as the star. Such a disappointment.
I liked the first one for what it was, a cheesy popcorn movie. It didn’t attempt to be faithful to the book. I remember liking the book but it wasn’t a masterpiece.
I expect Edgar Wright to do a good and more faithful adaptation. I’m not 100% sold on Glenn Powell but Josh Brolin as Killian sounds like a good fit.
I hope this one is closer to the book. I like the Aaahhhnold version on its own merits but the book is much bettwr as is.
Supposedly, this version is meant to be more faithful to the novel. (I never read the novel so it didn’t bother me that the Arnold Schwarzenegger version wasn’t faithful to it. It was fun enough on its own. And Richard Dawson made for a fun villain.)
The articles I’ve read said it will be closer to the book. It’s not due out until next November so a lot can change.
I enjoy the Arnie version, and mentioned it recently as a perfect metaphor for the reality-show driven world that is Trump’s America, complete with talking to the President’s agent as the fasted way to get in touch with him…
But I would have agreed prior to 2016 that the book was a better interpretation of where we were going. And I’d love to see it. I’d be surprised if they kept the original ending though, for reasons now borne out in history.
I’m not sure this needs to be made as a fictional movie; we seem to be edging closer to this in reality every day. Also, who keeps pushing Glen Powell as the next action movie star? He’s a plank of wood, and not even as interesting as knotty pine. Every time I see him in a role I think to myself, “He looks like…nobody.”. Josh Brolin has proven himself as a fine actor but I just don’t think he can outsleeze Richard Dawson.
Pass even for free on streaming.
Stranger
Come on! Mick Fleetwood! Dweezil Zappa! Richard Dawson! Arnold!
My 17 year old self turns on the sonic deadline just for you.
I went in expecting it to be faithful to the book and was sorely disappointed. I just can’t get past that to judge it on it’s own merits.
I loved the book, I read it as a teenager, and the ending was fantastic. I have the feeling that movie audiences wouldn’t appreciate it as much though.
Hmm, I always thought of The Hunger Games as a modern remake of The Running Man. I guess I will judge this remake more against that than I would the Arnold version.
Hunger Games
Battle Royale
The Condemned
Gamer
Guns Akimbo
Game Night
The Hunt
Self Reliance
Jackpot
Squid Game
Every iteration of Most Dangerous Game (which includes Hard Target with JCVD, Surviving the Game with Ice-T, and the most recent version with Liam Hemsworth)
Various Rollerballs and Death Races
There’s no shortage of “people hunt” movies.
Running Man, much like Total Recall and Starship Troopers worked as entertaining over the top 90s action films that weren’t super accurate in adapting their source material.
There is certainly room for closer adaptation. But a more serious movie with serious actors isn’t necessarily “better”. Look at remakes of Total Recall and Robocop as evidence.
Several thoughts:
1.) It wouldn’t be hard for a new film to be more faithful to the original novel – the first film deviated very significantly from the novel.
2.) They HAVE to change the ending, though. There’s no way theyd end it with the hero flying an airplane into a skyscrapr, after 9/11
3.) One thing the original movie has going for it – it’s the only movie where Erland van Lidth de Jeude got to sing in his own voice. Erland had a very voluminous and fine singing voice – I think that enormous body of his was a huge sounding box . He’d been a member of the Musical Theater Guild at MIT, and he sang in Greenwich Village spots after he graduated. But when he appeared in the movie Stir Crazy they dubbed his voice (apparently he wasn’t in the right unions, or something). I kept telling people “That’s not Erland. It doesn’t sound at all like him.” Well, apparently they patched all that up by the time they made The Running Man, because that WAS his voice. The problem is hearing Erland (as Dynamo) singing over the noise of the explosions.
4.) As I’ve remarked before, there’s a suspicious similarity between King’s The Running Man and Robert Sheckley’s 1958 story The Prize of Peril, as Sheckley himself observed. He finally came to the conclusion that King had read his story, but forgot this, and it subconsciously affected his writing. In any event, Sheckley’s story was twice adapted in foreign countries – in 1970 in Germany as Der Millionenspiel and in France in 1983 as Le Prix du Danger, so it’s sorta as if this is a fourth adaptation.
Oh, I disagree with this. He certainly has been cast in the same role for a number of his movies, but he nails “cocky/smarmy narcissist”. And he shows a bit of range in “Hit Man”. It’s not Oscar worthy or anything, but he’s fun to watch.
Also Yaphet Kotto! Toru Tanaka! Jesse “The Body” Ventura!!!
This movie is one of my guilty pleasures, and as poor of an adaptation as it is, it’s actually a pretty fun Reagan-era action romp.
It also features the best ever comeback to Ah-nuld saying “I’ll be back.”
For what it’s worth I enjoyed the RoboCop remake.
I don’t know who Glen Powell is (I recognize the name but can’t put a face or a character to it). He’s not built like Aaanold in the 80’s is he? In the book Richards isn’t a body builder - he’s skinny and malnourished and sick (because he’s poor), and only doing it because his daughter is desperately ill. I prefer this version and hope they don’t screw it up.
The tagline ‘The futuristic United States of 2025 when the world has become a dystopia.’ certainly tracks.
Hopefully they won’t forget The Hate Boat poster.
I’m a big Arnold fan, but even I thought it was pretty lame.
I don’t really see this as a remake so much as a different adaptation of the same source material. If the new movie adheres more closely to the source material I’m hard pressed to think of it as a remake. Maybe I’m just overthinking this.
It’s an interesting question. Sometimes a remake is very clearly influenced by a previous movie version. The 2002 Steven Soderbergh/George Clooney Solaris is very clearly based on the 1972 Tarkovsky film of the same name, sand not directly on the Stanislas Lem novel the first film was based on. The 2002 film differs from the novel in exactly the same ways the 1972 film did.
On the other hand, Wikipedia lists 24 different films based on Robert Louis Steveson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mister Hyde (although some of those are very loosely based on it, indeed). I doubt if any film version is directly inspired by any previous film version. All essentially trace back to the original novel (or at least to the ideas in the novel). Yet these are routinely called “remakes”. You could say as much for the various versions of Frankenstein or Dracula or the various Sherlock Holmes stories. Or all the versions of Beowulf that came out around 2000.
The 2010 Clash of the Titans is pretty clearly inspired by the 1981 Clash of the Titans, but no other version of the story of the story of Perseus and Medusa has anything to do with either of these.
“Remake” is obviously pretty loosely used to refer to different film versions of the same story, whether based on the same source material or on the previous film. I don’t mind when people say that the 1940 Thief of Bagdad is a remake of the 1926 film. I’m just annoyed when they say it’s got the same plot (it doesn’t)