When Stephen King wrote The Running Man in the early 1980s, under his pseudonym Richard Bachman, he imagined a near-future society in the distant year of 2025, where poverty, authoritarianism, and reality television had replaced the truth.
More than 40 years later, and actually in the futuristic year of 2025, King’s dystopia feels disturbingly prophetic.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Access deeper industry intelligence
Experience unmatched clarity with a single platform that combines unique data, AI, and human expertise.
With Edgar Wright’s film adaptation of the film arriving in cinemas in November 2025, it is worth considering why this brutal story still feels so relevant today.
A world of economic desperation
At its heart, The Running Man is a story about a man driven to extremes by his surroundings. Ben Richards is unemployed with a sick child at home, with no hope of salvation. His one chance is to risk his life on a deadly game show with the hope that the prize money will provide for his family. In King’s world, the working class has been stripped of security and dignity, forced to do anything to survive.
Although the premise is exaggerated, in an age of gig work, zero-hour contracts, and rising living costs (as well as reality TV such as Big Brother and The Traitors) the idea of a person risking humiliation and danger for money does not feel like fiction. In The Running Man, King makes sure to remind the reader that true dystopia does not begin with monsters; it starts with the deep-rooted inequality faced by individuals at the bottom of the ladder.
The age of spectacle
In the novel, the titular game show, The Running Man, is a national obsession. Contestants are hunted for sport on live television, their deaths becoming entertainment. Citizens across the country even earn rewards for reporting sightings of the contestants, forcing friends to turn on friends.
US Tariffs are shifting - will you react or anticipate?
Don’t let policy changes catch you off guard. Stay proactive with real-time data and expert analysis.
By GlobalDataWhile we are not quite at the same level of televised violence, the scenario is not far-fetched. Today’s world of reality TV, viral social media challenges, and livestreamed violence and chaos has turned human suffering into entertainment. Perhaps King foresaw the possibility of violence as spectacle and predicted what its effect would be on our collective empathy. His world, like ours, is addicted to the spectacle of a person’s downfall.
Authoritarian media and control of the truth
In King’s imagined world, the televised violence is orchestrated by the “Games Network”, a government-operated television station. For the Network, in-world reality television shows like “The Running Man”, “Swim the Crocodiles”, or “Treadmill To Bucks” are not simply entertainment; they are propaganda. The state distracts the masses with broadcast violence while suppressing dissent.
The Running Man asks the reader to consider truth. Namely, who controls it? It is a pointed warning that feels especially relevant today. In our always-online world of manipulated algorithms and political spin, the control of the narrative has become as powerful as the control of the law.
A familiar world
The upcoming adaptation, directed by Edgar Wright, promises to hew more closely to the tone of the original book, unlike the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger adaptation. Wright has described it as a “few minutes to the left of our world”, so not futuristic, but familiar.
When the novel was published, it was speculative fiction. Now, much of the story feels ripped straight from today’s headlines. From the collapsing economy, the exploitation of the most desperate, and the omnipresence of screens, King’s 2025 is already here. But the story asks a simple question: how far will people go simply to survive in a system that’s stacked against them? And what happens when their downfall becomes entertainment?
