Stephen King wrote The Running Man in 1972 when, as he’d later describe, he was “a young man who was angry, energetic, and infatuated with the art and the craft of writing”. It imagines a reality television show in which the lower classes are violently hunted for entertainment, their narratives re-edited and manipulated in order to villainise those who dare subvert the status quo. He set it in 2025. How painfully prescient – and how poignant it should be to see it adapted for film in this year of all years.
Its hero, Ben Richards (here played by Glen Powell), signs up to take part in The Running Man after he’s blacklisted from any viable means of employment for showing a little too much solidarity with his fellow man. The film, meanwhile, is being released by Paramount, the first major studio to issue a public denouncement of the signees of a pledge to boycott Israeli film institutions implicated in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. As I said, painfully prescient.
