How The X-Factor Inspired The Running Man’s Biggest Change From Stephen King’s Book
Ben Richards just got the villain edit.
Stephen King’s 1982 novel The Running Man, published under his pseudonym Richard Bachman, is far from being “unadaptable.” But there are definitely some grim elements that would be difficult to bring to life on the big screen. Or, in the words of The Running Man director Edgar Wright, “There was some rougher edges in the book that are probably not going to be in a studio movie.”
Case in point: the ending of the novel, in which Ben Richards, the winner of the Running Man game show, flies a plane into the Network skyscraper. The 2025 Running Man clearly steers away from this ending (though it nods to it pretty obliquely), on top of a handful of other changes from the book. But what exactly is different between the new movie and the book? And how does it change the overall tone of the movie?
Inverse spoke with Wright on the surprising reality show that influenced the biggest change to The Running Man, and why it makes the movie all the more relevant today.
Spoilers ahead for The Running Man!
What Are The Biggest Changes From The Book?
The Running Man host Bobby T (Colman Domingo) puts on a show.
The 2025 The Running Man actually sticks quite close to the beats of the novel, especially compared to the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film. But it still folds in a handful of minor changes throughout. Ben Richards’ wife, Sheila (Jayme Lawson), isn’t a prostitute like in the book, for example, though the Network isn’t above implying that she is to the jeering audience of The Running Man game show. Here are a couple of other minor tweaks:
- Ben’s wife and daughter are put into protective custody as soon as he joins The Running Man, preventing their fate in the novel (getting fatally shot by robbers) from happening.
- In the novel, Bradley Throckmorton is a gang member who teaches Ben about the Network’s widespread pollution and propaganda efforts. In the movie (played by Daniel Ezra), he’s a full-fledged rebel and the creator of the Apostle show, a bombastic YouTube-style channel that analyzes every episode of The Running Man and debunks the propaganda surrounding it.
- Elton Parrakis (Michael Cera) gets a more extensive origin story in the movie involving his murdered former cop father. The sequence in which he rigs his house to take revenge on the cops that murdered his father is also original to the movie.
- In the movie, the lead Hunter, Evan McCone (Lee Pace), is revealed to be the survivor of the first season of The Running Man, who was offered the same deal as Ben Richards to become a hunter after he got too close to winning. He does not take kindly to being fired and potentially replaced by Ben.
Of course, the biggest change 2025’s The Running Man makes to the book is to the ending. In the book, Ben learns from Killian that his wife and daughter had been dead for 10 days, having been murdered by intruders. It’s here that Killian makes his offer to have Ben take the role of lead Hunter, but after Ben murders the flight crew and McCone, he reprograms the plane’s autopilot to fly it into the Network tower. The movie almost makes it seem like it will end this way too, before it freezes. “Let’s rewind that!” a familiar voice says...
From The Mouth Of The Apostle
The biggest change from the book is to Bradley Throckmorton, who now plays a rebel and mega-fan of The Running Man, who helps Ben in his game.
The movie’s biggest invention is of the Apostle show created by Bradley Throckmorton. The movie’s revamp of Bradley is fascinating — not only is he a rebel secretly working to take down the Network, he’s also clearly a mega-fan of the show The Running Man. In his secret lair, he has hundreds of tapes breaking down every episode of the game show, dressed in a ridiculously loud outfit that masks his entire face and body. Everything, from his bombastic delivery to the cheesy sound effects, feels familiar to anyone who’s watched a two-hour YouTube breakdown of Survivor. But the part that feels the most familiar to contemporary audiences his how he breaks down the three types of contestants on The Running Man:
- Type 1: The Hopeless Dude
- Type 2: The Negative Dude
- Type 3: Final Dude
This kind of gleeful labeling of people (which is ironic coming from a guy also working to take down the Network) is intentional. Wright tells Inverse that the idea came from his co-writer Michael Bacall, with whom he would watch breakdown videos of reality TV while they were working on the script. One such breakdown of the UK’s X-Factor struck the two of them: “They'd obviously wound up this contestant backstage and given her the wrong information,” Wright says, “Because they somehow knew that she had a temper and thought, ‘We've got to get her to flip out on stage.’”
That’s where Wright learned about the concept of someone getting “the villain edit,” which refers to when reality TV make a contestant look worse or more malicious in the edit.
This is what happens when you get the villain edit.
It “really struck me as being very Ben Richards-y,” Wright says. “The people are made to be national laughing stocks or made to be the villain and the tabloids all go after them.”
So Wright and Bacall worked into their script the concept of a “superfan who's also wise to all of the conspiracies.” Wright noted that the addition ended up ironically biting them in the backside a little, as they then had to shoot all the sequences where contestants met their bloody, untimely ends. But ultimately, Wright says it was “fun to all put together a lot of work.” And this new element ultimately proved crucial to The Running Man’s overarching arc and its new, more optimistic, ending.
