Stephen King in Conversation with Edgar Wright
In a notable year featuring many screen adaptations of Stephen King’s work, director Edgar Wright of The Running Man discusses with King the themes of media manipulation, the appeal of genre storytelling, and how reality has grown closer to his fiction since writing the original novella.
“Welcome to America in 2025 when the best men don’t run for president. They run for their lives…”
This was the tagline on the original book jacket of The Running Man, a dystopian tale where a government-controlled TV network pacifies the people with a brutal gameshow. Though published in 1982, King wrote it in the early 1970s under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. It later gained more recognition in 1985 within the collection The Bachman Books, alongside novellas such as Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), and Roadwork (1981).
In 1987, Paul Michael Glaser directed a loose film adaptation starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as Ben Richards, the everyman hero. While it preserved the deadly gameshow concept, it departed from much of the book’s content.
Despite Hollywood’s typically slow pace, Edgar Wright’s faithful adaptation is finally releasing in 2025—the very year the original novel envisioned—highlighting how far King’s speculative future now feels within reach.
Key Points from the Conversation
- The original novella was penned well before its 1982 publication, showing King’s foresight.
- Its themes of authoritarian media control and survival remain relevant today.
- Wright's version aims to stay true to King’s vision in contrast to previous adaptations.
- The story’s 2025 setting was once a distant future, now seemingly close.
Author’s Summary
King reflects on how his early work has become strikingly relevant, with Edgar Wright’s film capturing the novel’s essence as reality approaches the dystopian vision once imagined for 2025.
Would you like the summary to be more analytical or more straightforward?