Before The Hunger Games and even Battle Royale, there was The Running Man, a grimy 80s vision where TV and government are basically the same beast, and entertainment chews people up for ratings. With Edgar Wright’s long-gestating remake finally headed to theaters soon, here’s how the original actually happened. It’s a wild path: a wheelchair mogul with an airport paperback, the Stephen King alter ego reveal, Arnold coming in like a wrecking ball, multiple directors ping-ponging through, Paula Abdul dance numbers, a proto-deepfake that confused 1987 audiences, a plagiarism lawsuit, and a release date shuffle to avoid competing with... Arnold.
The airport paperback that lit the fuse
In 1982, George Linder — at the time the owner of the biggest lightweight wheelchair supplier in the U.S. — grabbed a copy of The Running Man off an airport bookstore shelf. He’d never heard of the author, Richard Bachman, but the line on the cover got him: 'Welcome to America in 2025, where the best men don’t run for president; they run for their lives!' He decided then and there he wanted to make it a movie.
The rights, however, weren’t cheap for a supposed mid-list writer with four books in print and about 100,000 copies sold: $20,000 just to option it, plus a bigger payday if the movie actually got made. Linder ponied up anyway and took it to the newly formed Taft/Barish outfit, where producers Rob Cohen and Keith Barish were lining up a slate that hopped from prestige (Endless Love, Sophie’s Choice) to culty crowd-pleasers (Big Trouble in Little China).
They liked the concept but razzed him for overpaying — right up until a Washington, D.C. bookseller connected the dots that Richard Bachman was actually Stephen King. Suddenly, this cheap paperback had a much bigger shadow.
'It was like finding a Rembrandt in a K-Mart.'
There was one snag: King. By the mid-80s, he was unhappy with a lot of adaptations, and when he saw The Running Man script, he felt it had basically just borrowed the title. He refused to let the movie use his name, so the film credits the novel to 'Richard Bachman' — accurate, but less marketable in a pre-Google world where most moviegoers had no idea Bachman was King.
From everyman to Arnold
Early on, the team had a 30-page treatment closer in spirit to King’s book: an everyman named Ben Richards caught in a dystopia that chews people up for profit. Names like Christopher Reeve were floated for the lead. Without 'Stephen King' on the poster, though, the project needed a bankable star, and names like Dolph Lundgren and Patrick Swayze came up before the obvious answer landed: Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Once Arnold signed, Steven E. de Souza (hot off 48 Hrs. and Commando) went through a whopping 15 drafts to refit the story. The book’s bleak family angle — a sick child, a desperate wife forced into sex work — vanished. In the movie, Ben Richards becomes an ex-military man framed for a massacre, tossed in prison, and shoved into the deadly game show when he’s recaptured. The TV spectacle — the host, the studio, the audience — blew up into the main attraction, which was de Souza’s whole point: the more it looks like a game show, the more the audience (in the movie and in the theater) gets amped.
Cast the gladiators, build the circus
The book’s hunters were largely anonymous; the movie turned them into comic-book bruisers with stage names and signature weapons. Former NFL star Jim Brown shows up. Wrestlers Jesse 'The Body' Ventura and Professor Toru Tanaka suit up. They even hired a legit opera singer, Erland Van Lidth, and let his pipes loose. On Team Richards: Yaphet Kotto and Marvin McIntyre as fellow runners, Maria Conchita Alonso as the love interest, and Mick Fleetwood as the resistance leader — and yes, fans still joke he might be playing a version of himself.
The real villain is TV puppet master Damon Killian, a mash-up of two characters from the novel. The producers first tried Burt Reynolds, who bailed when told he’d be billed last. Then they went to actual game show king Chuck Woolery (Wheel of Fortune, Love Connection), but his hosting schedule killed it. Arnold had a better idea: Richard Dawson from Family Feud. Perfect casting. He could turn on oily showbiz charm and shark-smile menace on a dime.
The director merry-go-round (and the one who made the day)
- George P. Cosmatos (Rambo: First Blood Part II) was first hired, but his take leaned into a broader revolution angle and relocated much of the action to a mall. Depending on which version you believe, he left when the budget tightened or was fired over the direction.
- Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid & Nancy) was approached next, but scheduling back-to-back projects made it a no-go.
- Carl Schenkel, a major director in Germany, passed after balking at the scope.
- Ferdinand Fairfax, a British director looking for his breakout, also wanted to take it somewhere else entirely, so that fell apart too.
- Andrew Davis, a longtime cinematographer who’d directed The Final Terror and Chuck Norris’s Code of Silence, finally got the job. Eight days in, he was reportedly $8 million over budget and nearly a week behind. He’d also shot scenes he invented that the producers didn’t want. Davis was fired. (It worked out for him: he later made two of Steven Seagal’s biggest hits and The Fugitive with Harrison Ford.)
- Enter Paul Michael Glaser — yes, Starsky from Starsky and Hutch — making the jump from acting to directing after episodes of Miami Vice. Michael Mann vouched for him. Arnold wasn’t thrilled with Glaser’s approach, but Glaser did what the producers needed: shoot fast, stay on budget, and make the date. Meanwhile, the budget woes got so real that George Linder reportedly sold his wheelchair company to help keep the production afloat.
All the showbiz trimmings
Because Killian’s show is half the movie, they went all-in on production value. Former Laker Girl Paula Abdul choreographed the studio dance numbers, even bringing in some of her old teammates. And Harold Faltermeyer, the synth wizard behind Beverly Hills Cop, Fletch, and Top Gun, dialed down the pep for a more somber, uneasy score. Smart call — the movie needed edge more than bounce.
Accidentally predicting the future
The Running Man didn’t just pregame reality TV — it literally helped one of its biggest hits happen. The pitch for American Gladiators was basically: The Running Man without the killing. But the eeriest nod to the future arrived by accident. Late in the film, the show uses doctored footage to 'kill' Ben and Amber by swapping their faces onto other bodies. Test audiences in 1987 were baffled — what they were seeing reads today like deepfake tech, but no one had that language then — so a worried producer had the sequence re-edited to underline what was happening.
The release shuffle, the box office dip, and the lawsuit
One more curveball before release: Predator (from 20th Century Fox) was also an Arnold movie, and nobody wanted him cannibalizing his own audience — especially with a few recent Arnie underperformers still fresh in memory. So The Running Man, an indie production, moved off summer to November.
It opened November 13, 1987, briefly dethroned Fatal Attraction at the top of the box office, then promptly got steamrolled by Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Three Men and a Baby. Critics were mixed at best. Then came the ouch: a successful plagiarism suit from the producers of the 1983 French film Le Prix du Danger. Final tally: about $38 million domestic on a budget that had swelled to around $27 million — respectable, but not what anyone hoped for at the time.
Of course, that’s the 80s for you. The movie’s reputation climbed over the years, fans embraced its grimy satire and go-for-broke tone, and now we’re here waiting to see if Edgar Wright’s version can do what Killian would want: go bigger, play cleaner, and avoid the legal department.