Glen Powell is The Running Man

Finally, a trailer for a good-looking movie we don’t have to wait a million years for. The trailer for Edgar Wright’s new adaptation of The Running Man is here and I am super into it, with one reservation.

Glen Powell stars in the new version, which has Wright as director and co-writer, scripting alongside Michael Bacall, who previously worked with Wright on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (he also wrote the Jump Street movies). The film is adapted from Stephen King’s 1982 novel, originally published under the nom de plume Richard Bachman. Set in 2025, it depicts a dystopic, morally bankrupt America in which citizens watch as their neighbors are hunted in the streets for sport. On the Sci-Fi Scale of Creepy Prescience, The Running Man rates “TOO REAL”.

The first film adaptation came out in 1987 and stars Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s not a great film but it’s not horrible, either. There are some good ideas in it, especially the satirization of television, like Network for the action movie set. But The Running Man has always been ripe for remake, to redo it with, well, a better actor than Schwarzenegger, and Glen Powell looks perfect in the trailer.

He's got the believable build of an action star, but he’s also a good actor and he’s good at comedy, and Edgar Wright’s Running Man very much looks like an action comedy. That is Wright’s sweet spot, and no one, and I mean NO ONE, does action comedy better than Edgar Wright. Just this trailer is edited spectacularly well, the action is perfectly timed to the music cues. You can usually count the rhythm of Wright’s action scenes in musical meters, something he made explicit in Baby Driver, and seems to be carrying over in The Running Man. I love the look, I love the tone, I love Colman Domingo as the flamboyantly cruel host, I love this as the next step in Glen Powell’s movie star evolution. I especially love that it comes out in November, which is just four months away. Not a long wait for a movie that looks legitimately great!

What I don’t love is that we’re more or less living in The Running Man. There is not a game show about hunting humans for sport—yet—but it feels like we’re just six months away from someone pitching The Running Man as an actual reality show. As was the case during the first Trump presidency, we’re past the point of satire. You can’t satirize how off-the-rails stupid and cruel our timeline is. It kills some of my enthusiasm for the project, knowing that we’re more or less living the worst impulses depicted in the movie (or show, this is the same reason I could never really get in step with Squid Game). Is it satire or is it just reality?