"Or, in the words of The Running Man director Edgar Wright, "There was some rougher edges in the book that are probably not going to be in a studio movie." Case in point: the ending of the novel, in which Ben Richards, the winner of the Running Man game show, flies a plane into the Network skyscraper."
"The 2025 Running Man clearly steers away from this ending (though it nods to it pretty obliquely), on top of a handful of other changes from the book. But what exactly is different between the new movie and the book? And how does it change the overall tone of the movie? Inverse spoke with Wright on the surprising reality show that influenced the biggest change to The Running Man, and why it makes the movie all the more relevant today."
"The 2025 The Running Man actually sticks quite close to the beats of the novel, especially compared to the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film. But it still folds in a handful of minor changes throughout. Ben Richards' wife, Sheila (Jayme Lawson), isn't a prostitute like in the book, for example, though the Network isn't above implying that she is to the jeering audience of The Running Man game show. Here are a couple of other minor tweaks:"
The 2025 film follows the core beats of the 1982 source material while removing or altering its grimmer elements. The climactic act that involved a protagonist crashing a plane into a corporate skyscraper is omitted, with only an oblique nod retained. Key character details shift: the protagonist's partner is not portrayed as a sex worker and is placed into protective custody, avoiding a fatal outcome from the original source. A secondary character is reimagined from a gang affiliate into an organized rebel leader. The film modernizes tone and emphasizes relevance to present-day media culture.
Read at Inverse
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