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The Running Man movies have failed to stick the landing both times, according to the writer of the 1987 version
The Running Man by Stephen King ends on a real downer note, so both the Glen Powell and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies have had to change things up.
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Look, we were excited for Edgar Wright and Glen Powell’s The Running Man remake. It looked fun. It looked stylish. It… did not do well at the box office. Part of the problem seems to be the ending, which struggles to deliver on what the rest of the movie has promised. And if you ask the writer of the 1987 Schwarzenegger film, it is always the ending of The Running Man that causes problems.
Steve E. de Souza wrote the script for the 1987 The Running Man film, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he recently explained that both movies had to make some big changes to the original Stephen King book. “The book’s ending is a downer, so you need a new ending.” In the original book, Ben Richards's family is killed by intruders, so he crashes a plane into the Network’s headquarters.
Yeah. Bit of a downer.
(For those who have seen the 2025 movie, it should be noted that it hews very closely to the book, before pulling back at the final moment: in its ending, it's revealed that Richards and his family have both survived, and that they're even reunited.)
Both the 1987 and 2025 film adaptations change the ending to allow Ben to join the resistance against the government. De Souza says that when he read the script for the 2025 The Running Man, he thought they had worked out the ending. “I read it and [felt that] on paper, they got the ending working. Even the reviews that love it say it stumbles at the end. It seems to me that this time around, something went wrong between the page and the stage again.”
There are some similarities between both films, but the difference seems to be scale. “I would say that both the ’87 version and this version tweak the ending in pretty much the same way, except in our version we had less money, so it’s a little simpler. Maybe the third version in 2045 will stick the landing.”
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