Stephen King in conversation with Edgar Wright: “When I wrote The Running Man, 2025 seemed so far in the future that I couldn’t even grasp it in my mind”

Stephen King in Conversation with Edgar Wright

When Fiction Meets Its Own Future

In a remarkable year for screen adaptations of Stephen King’s stories, director Edgar Wright discusses with the author how media, dystopia, and reality continue to intersect. Their conversation centers on The Running Man—a dark vision of a TV game show where contestants flee for their lives under the gaze of a government-controlled network.

“Welcome to America in 2025 when the best men don’t run for president. They run for their lives…”

This biting tagline from the original 1982 edition captured the novel’s tone. Although first published in the early eighties, King had written it around a decade earlier under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. The story reemerged in 1985 within The Bachman Books collection, alongside Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), and Roadwork (1981).

From Page to Screen

Two years after the compendium’s release, Arnold Schwarzenegger played Ben Richards in Paul Michael Glaser’s film adaptation of The Running Man. While it retained the deadly television premise, the movie diverged significantly from King’s original storyline.

Now, as Wright’s upcoming interpretation strives for greater fidelity to the novella, the release coincides with the very year—2025—that King once envisioned as a distant, unimaginable future.

Stephen King Reflects

“When I wrote The Running Man, 2025 seemed so far in the future that I couldn’t even grasp it in my mind.”

Decades later, King’s imagined world feels alarmingly close to our own, blurring the line between speculative fiction and lived experience.

Author’s Summary

Stephen King and Edgar Wright explore how The Running Man, once a vision of far-off dystopia, now mirrors a world caught between entertainment and control.

BFI — 2025-11-07