The Running Man is currently in theaters and one of the most fascinating parts of the film was how money works. Or at least how the “New Dollars” system works. Because what do you mean a house is $900 but medication is $10?
Part of what drives Ben Richards (Glen Powell) to do the show “The Running Man” is his need to get medicine for his daughter. His wife, Sheila (Jayme Lawson) gets back from work and says that she can get $20 ND from one customer at the club where she works because he’d be too drunk to notice. This is after we hear on the television how some people earn as much as $75 ND on game shows.
Meaning that this amount of money is a lot to them. When Ben ends up on “The Running Man,” he is given a bonus for doing the show that he sends home to Sheila and their daughter Cathy and while it is $500 ND, that isn’t equal to our $500 and I know this for two reasons: The contestants get $1k ND to survive for a month and there is also a sign where houses are starting at $900 in Derry, Maine.
So the question remains: How does the money of this dystopian 2025 work? Is it like when my mom was growing up and you could get things for 25 cents? Or is everything extremely expensive and the price of the dollar is a lot more?
Like yes, I’d have to fight a clown but $900 for a brand new house…
It took me a couple of viewings of The Running Man to really start to understand how the money situation was working. At first, I questioned how Ben’s $1,000 lasted but then rewatching the movie, I counted what he spent. $200 for Molie (William H. Macy), $200 for the room in Boston, whatever the cost of the train ended up being, $10 for Bradley and his family, whatever the hotels cost, and then $500 to get him to safety but we don’t know whether that was a promise for later or if Ben gave it to him then. Point being: He still had some left over.
He managed to do all of that on less than $1k. In our own modern age, you couldn’t even spend a week in a hotel with that. In some places, you wouldn’t be able to spend 2 nights in a hotel. So it does seem like the worth of the dollar in this 2025 is a lot greater than it is in our society. And while I don’t want to live there…a $900 house does sound nice.
(featured image: Paramount Pictures)
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