Here’s the weird pitch: take the director of Baby Driver, hand him a grim Stephen King novel about a man running for his life on live television, and see what happens. That’s The Running Man 2025, and the short answer is — it’s fine. Good, even, in stretches. Just not the movie you’d expect from that director, for better and worse.
Ben Richards is broke and desperate. His kid is sick, the bills aren’t stopping, and the one option left is signing up for The Running Man — a game show where contestants get thirty days to stay alive while hired killers hunt them down on camera. Survive, and the prize money climbs every day. Get caught, and the show just moves on to the next guy. Glen Powell plays Richards, and he’s the reason this movie works as well as it does.
Josh Brolin plays Dan Killian, the producer who pulls Richards into the game expecting a forgettable contestant, a few days of decent ratings, then business as usual. Richards doesn’t cooperate with that plan. He’s too good, too watchable, and suddenly Killian’s got a problem that’s actually threatening the whole operation instead of feeding it.
Worth knowing going in: this isn’t the first time this story’s hit screens. Arnold Schwarzenegger did a version back in 1987 that basically stripped Stephen King’s original book down to an action-movie skeleton — one-liners, explosions, the whole deal. This version goes the other direction. Edgar Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall dig back into what King’s 1982 novel was actually chewing on — media obsession, class resentment, how easily people will watch someone else suffer for entertainment. It’s a heavier movie than the ’80s version, on purpose.
The cast around Powell is deep. William H. Macy, Lee Pace, Michael Cera, Emilia Jones, Daniel Ezra, Jayme Lawson, Sean Hayes, Colman Domingo — that’s a lot of talent for supporting roles, and Domingo especially does a lot with not much screen time.
On the release side: UK audiences got it first in early November 2025, the US followed a week later on November 14. Paramount put it out, it runs a little over two hours (133 minutes), and it reportedly cost around $110 million to make.
Now, the actual question — is it good? Depends what you walked in expecting. If you wanted the propulsive, every-frame-matters energy Wright brought to his earlier work, you’re probably going to feel a little shortchanged. That’s the general critical read too: the movie moves fine, Powell’s charisma is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but it never quite reaches the inventive highs Wright’s built his reputation on. Some of the writing over-explains things a sharper script would’ve trusted the audience to catch on their own, and the ending doesn’t stick the landing the setup promises.
But it’s not a bad movie by any stretch. Most people who’ve seen it still call it genuinely entertaining, even while admitting it falls short of greatness. And almost nobody disputes that Powell’s performance is the strongest thing in it — that part of the reaction is close to unanimous.
If you want to watch it: it’s available to rent or buy digitally, there’s a 4K and Blu-ray release out now, and it’s since made its way onto Paramount+ if you’ve already got that subscription.
Bottom line — go in expecting a solid, well-acted dystopian thriller, not a return to Wright’s most stylistically ambitious work, and you’ll probably enjoy it. Go in expecting Baby Driver with a King story bolted on, and you might walk out a little disappointed.
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