I love dystopian end-of-the-world movies.

I adore most dangerous game movies.

I heart future game-show movies about violence. 

By all rights, I should love this movie, and no, I didn’t.

It comes close, so close to what I want it to be, but it feels like it can barely get out of its own way.

If you grew up in the 80s, Paul Michael Glaser’s The Running Man was a neon-soaked, Lycra-stretching movie filled with Arnold one-liners and Richard Dawson’s oily charisma. It wasn’t Stephen King. It wasn’t even Richard Bachman. It was a cartoon. It also came several years after the book, as did much better versions of this story, like Endgame, Warriors of the Year 2072, and Death Race 2000.

Edgar Wright—the man who gave us the Cornetto Trilogy—has spent years obsessing over the actual book. He didn’t want sub-zeros and chainsaws; he wanted the grim, soot-stained nihilism of King’s 1982 novel. It also feels weird that they gave him such a huge budget and that he took on a very mainstream film, but we’ll get to that.

In a future that feels uncomfortably like next Tuesday, the U.S. is a bankrupt wasteland ruled by The Network. If you aren’t rich, you’re starving, and the only thing keeping the lights on is the high-def bloodsport of The Running Man.

Glen Powell plays Ben Richards, but forget the tanned, grinning flyboy from Top Gun: Maverick. Here, he’s a desperate, blacklisted union worker in the slums of Co-Op City. His kid is dying of the flu, he’s broke,  and his only option is to sign his life away to executive producer Dan Killian (Josh Brolin).

The rules are simple: Survive 30 days. You get a head start, a camcorder and the entire world is encouraged to murder you for cold, hard cash.

Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall turn the hunt into a paranoid, cross-country trek through a decaying America. Along the way, Richards meets a gallery of losers and rebels, including Michael Cera as an ill-fated activist in Derry, Maine (nice King nod there), and William H. Macy as a black-market disguise artist.

The film pulls no punches on the media satire. We get deepfakes, manipulated live feeds, and Colman Domingo as Bobby T, a game-show host who makes modern influencers look like saints. Even Lee Pace shows up as Evan McCone, the lead hunter who is less a gladiator and more a state-sponsored executioner.

Wright ditches his usual stylized editing for a more grounded, gritty approach. Powell does well, carrying the weight of a man who knows he’s already dead. As for Arnold, he shows up on the face of the $100 bill.  And it’s bleak. Really bleak. Audiences in late 2025 apparently weren’t in the mood for a $110 million bummer about the end of the world and the death of truth, which explains why it sank at the box office like a stone. It only clawed back $69 million, making it a certified bomb.

I wonder, beyond the love of the book, why Wright made this. It feels like anyone could have made this movie and not him. It’s missing his style and only retains the needledrops, which are more annoying in this than fitting. It all feels very static, perhaps because it also feels like something I could turn on the news and watch for real. Maybe that’s the beauty of the original film: it has these themes but also realizes that, as a cartoon, the medicine and message go down a lot smoother.