‘Running Man’ remake rekindles obsession with deadly contests: ‘Let the poor fight among themselves’

Although poet Gil Scott-Heron predicted that the revolution wouldn’t be televised, in the film The Running Man (1987), Arnold Schwarzenegger once again proved that axioms are meant to be overturned. The bodybuilder was the star of a dystopian movie where a totalitarian government was established in the United States and the most disadvantaged were hunted down in a brutal, virtually impossible-to-win television competition.

The hero, an army captain falsely accused of massacring civilians, was sent to compete to be sacrificed in front of an audience, but, as can be expected, Schwarzenegger’s character destroyed his captors one by one, violently and always with a punchline for each execution. Not only does he bring down the dictatorship with his bare muscles in prime time, he also has time to woo a beautiful, struggling contestant, played by Cuban singer and actress María Conchita Alonso.

The exaltation of the 1980s sometimes leads to films that had a modest reception on release, such as The Running Man, now being classified as classics by some. Schwarzenegger is not among them.

In his autobiography Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story (2012), the actor and former governor of California openly expressed his disappointment with the result: “The plot was fantastic and was totally wasted by the hiring of a novice director [...] who didn’t have time to think about what the film had to say about show business and government, or about what it meant to get to the point where people are killed on screen.”

The director who was thrown under the bus by the Austrian giant, by the way, was none other than Paul Michael Glaser, the detective Starsky in the series Starsky & Hutch (1975-79).

With such a precedent, Schwarzenegger was the first to enthusiastically welcome the remake scheduled for release in theaters in November. The new version is directed by Edgar Wright, director of Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010). The lead role is taken by Glen Powell (Twisters, Top Gun: Maverick).

“I think they have a good chance of making it better,” said Schwarzenegger, whom Wright and Powell contacted for his blessing. In the trailer for the new The Running Man, you can see a tribute to Schwarzenegger — who is not part of the cast — whose face adorns the banknotes of those dystopian United States.

Another conclusion that the two-and-a-half-minute trailer allows us to draw is that, as its director and co-writer promised, The Running Man will be more faithful to Stephen King’s original 1982 novel, which served as the basis for the 1987 movie in little more than the premise. To add to the confusion, that novel was one of the books that King published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, as his editors felt that the master was saturating the market and competing with himself with his frenetic writing pace.

The book was not only darker, tenser, and more fatalistic, but also featured a different dynamic: unlike the film, where Schwarzenegger had to save his own life (and take a few others along the way) on a soundstage for three hours, in the book the character had to endure 30 days with the freedom to move or hide. In a perverse twist, citizens were rewarded for informing on him and helping to capture him. Or, of course, punished for doing so.

Set in 2017, which of course was, at the time, the future, The Running Man isn’t the finest social allegory. At most, its vision of media manipulation could be considered current, as in the crude montage that distorts the protagonist to make him look like a psychopath, no more sophisticated than many of the hoaxes we face daily, or the scene in which the network’s operators use technology to simulate the hero’s death in front of the cameras, which references the modern dissemination of fake images through AI.

Essentially funny and unhingedly violent, a viewing of The Running Man today has the humorous appeal of its tacky esthetic, combined with the extreme delirium that surrounds the fictional game show. Among the hitmen — whom Schwarzenegger either chars alive or saws in half through their groins — are characters like Subzero and Dynamo, men who sing opera, deliver electric shocks, and wear light-up suits. King’s imagination didn’t reach such heights in the book.

Although, in terms of imagination, The Running Man isn’t the best example (nor, to be honest, is King’s novel). Director Yves Boisset sued 20th Century Fox and Schwarzenegger for the very reasonable similarities it presented with a previous film of his, the 1983 Franco-Yugoslav co-production Le Prix du Danger (The Prize of Peril), with a copied plot. That film was based on another short story published in 1958 by Robert Sheckley, although the accusation didn’t implicate King, whose novel had a different development than that reflected in the film’s script.

The lawsuit lasted 11 years and was resolved in favor of Boisset, who was financially compensated with an unspecified amount. However, the theme of manhunts goes back much further. In addition to the many historical references to members of the elite capturing and killing defenseless people for fun or as a form of training, it already appears in fiction in Richard Connell’s story The Most Dangerous Game (1924), adapted to the screen dozens of times: from the RKO Pictures classic of the same name (1932) to the spectacular Hard Target (1993), with Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Worse worlds

The literary critic Fredric Jameson, who died last year, lamented that in recent times it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Another key thinker of our time, Mark Fisher, coined the concept of “reflexive impotence” to refer to the anomaly where society, as a whole, is aware of the flaws and injustices of the system, yet there is a collective inability to devise alternatives, resulting in general resignation, passivity, and acceptance.

Perhaps this is why modern fiction has been extraordinarily fertile in producing stories where the evils of the market economy or the worst aspects of human nature (selfishness, hatred of those who are different, cruelty) are not only not corrected, but rather lead to dystopian extremes.

In one of the most relevant and commented-on cultural essays in recent years, Utopia is not an island (2020), the writer Layla Martínez proposed moving beyond the slogan “There is no future” so that the hope for a better world would no longer be seen as a naive horizon, with examples of positive and real transformative experiences.

The philosopher Francisco Martorell Campos has also dedicated two books to the issue, Dreaming Otherwise: How We Lost Utopia and How to Recover It (2019) and Against Dystopia: The B-Side of a Mass Genre (2021). In the second, Martorell observed that, despite the denunciatory purpose present in many successful dystopias, the mass consumption of The Hunger Games (2008-10 the literary trilogy and 2012-15 the film adaptations) or the series Squid Game (2021-25) did not produce more critical viewers, but rather encouraged conformism and the perception that, when it comes to comparing ourselves, we are not that bad either.

Martorell admits to EL PAÍS that The Running Man doesn’t strike him as a “particularly remarkable” film, although he finds the changes from the book striking. “I imagine that the fact that it ends with a victory for the protagonist was because Schwarzenegger couldn’t lose; it was even a condition of his agents. But the system can’t be defeated by a single individual, no matter how strong they are.”

In the novel, the character did find strategic support from dissidents in marginalized communities. “The social component that was present in Stephen King’s work was eliminated. The existence of rebel communities outside the system represents the utopian element of these dystopias, almost always multiracial groups preparing an offensive,” he notes.

The philosopher also distinguishes other “utopian facets” in this type of competition-based dystopia, “embodied in the cooperation and mutual care shown by the most worthy players, in the attempts at revolutions they provoke, and in the ethical integrity the hero maintains until the end.”

That The Running Man is being produced at the same time as a sixth Hunger Games feature film is being shot, or that the combined total of Squid Game seasons so far in 2025 has once again become Netflix’s most-watched series, seems to point to a sign of the times. Before that, there were the Maze Runner films (2014-18), the 3% television series (2016-20), or even Death Race (2008), a remake with Jason Statham of Death Race 2000 (1975).

At the end of November, just two weeks after The Running Man, The Long Walk is scheduled to be released in theaters. Another Stephen King adaptation (also published under the name Richard Bachman in 1979), where a group of 100 teenagers participate in a government competition to walk tirelessly until only one remains alive. It is directed by Francis Lawrence, the filmmaker behind most of the Hunger Games installments.

Why do so many futuristic narratives about, in particular, deadly game shows proliferate? “Their success is no coincidence,” Martorell responds. “They denounce the modus operandi of the society we live in, a gamified society that has absorbed the codes of the game and revolves around challenges, tests, rankings, and rewards. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about the world of work or education, social media, or research. The best thing about these narratives is that they bring to the fore the great triumph of capitalist ideology, which is that it has managed to get the poor to compete with each other, to fight among themselves, and to leave the system alone.”

For the author, other expressions can be found in certain online phenomena. “The winner ethic is the dominant paradigm. Competing has become a cool way of life. MrBeast’s videos reflect, while also enhancing, this collective drive.” In 2021, MrBeast launched a contest based on the trials featured in Squid Game — obviously without the fatalities — something that Netflix replicated in 2023. Recently, the YouTuber announced his plans to turn The Hunger Games into a reality show.

In May, news caused astonishment that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was considering a proposal for a contest called The American, in which 12 migrants would compete to obtain U.S. citizenship. Its promoter — the same behind Duck Dynasty (2012–17), an 11-season reality show centered on duck hunting — claimed to have had positive contacts, until DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, after days of criticism, denied in Congress that it would be given the green light.

“Something that is a priori dystopian becomes utopian for some people,” laments Martorell. “In fact, the social model advocated by the fashionable paleolibertarians (the disappearance of governments, the reduction of the state to the task of maintaining social order, the power of multinationals, the privatization of public services, etc.) is no different from that recreated by the cyberpunk dystopias of the 1980s.” A real return to the future.

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