Edgar Wright finished filming his adaptation of Stephen King’s The Running Man only a few days ago but we’ve already seen the first footage. The director of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and Baby Driver was in Las Vegas for CinemaCon 2025 along with stars Glen Powell, Coleman Domingo, and Josh Brolin to show people what they’ve been making—and it looks amazing.
What you won’t get from the below description is how all of it is all 100% Edgar Wright. So: lots of editing timed perfectly to the music. Broad, sweeping camera moves. High energy. Take that and put it on this.
Ben Richards (Powell) walks though a slum in a red hoodie. We hear a powerful person (Brolin) tell him that he’s aware of Ben’s crisis and thinks appearing on The Running Man will solve it. Ben’s wife, played by Jayme Lawson, makes him promise he won’t go on the show, but it seems like his kid is sick and this is a chance to solve all his problems.
Somewhere else, a family is watching the show and in a POV of a crossbow we follow the arrow through the woods and then smashing someone’s head into a tree. Ben tells Brolin, “No,” he won’t go on the show and to fuck himself two times. “That right there is why you can win this,” Brolin says.
Coleman Domingo plays the host of the show and we see him in a maroon colored suit, speaking to the camera about the show. Meanwhile, we watch Ben go through tests to make sure he can appear on the show. A huge room of people on treadmills. Him holding a cattle prod in his hand and just dealing with the pain. On the set, there are dancers and crowd excitement as Ben and others get into tubes with the words “Going down” over them. “This is America, dammit!” Domingo says, “We don’t take bullshit.”
“Hunt him down!” Domingo’s character says to the camera, as we see Ben out in the world. He’s standing in front of his wanted poster in a disguise. Quick cuts show him in all other sorts of scenarios. In a booby-trapped house. Sleeping when a gun gets put to his head. A pink convertible driving through the streets. “Stop filming me,” he screams in extreme close-up to a camera following him around.
A fight takes place in the cockpit of a plane and the sudden shifts result in the pilots and Ben losing their gravity and floating in the air. Machine guns kill the pilots. Uh-oh.
Ben swings from a rope into a building and crashes through the window. The person whose room he smashes into says, “You’re on TV,” and he is, right then, in that moment. As he tries to escape, the camera follows him through a hallway in a long take with all manner of explosions and gunshots happening all around him.
At the end of the hall, Ben slides into an elevator shaft and throws a grenade back. A bad guy throws it back to him it explodes in the elevator. Ben falls all the way down into a sewer and lands safely in the gross water. “I’m still here, you shit eaters!” he screams into the camera while giving the middle finger.
Finally, Ben is back in a booby-trapped house owned by a character played by Michael Cera. Soldiers pour into the house and Cera electrocutes the floor. As they walk down the hallway, Cera grabs a large water gun, pumps it up, and fires at the ground. They all light up.
The Running Man, which looks simply amazing, opens in theaters on November 7.
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