Weird Wednesdays: The Prescience of The Running Man and its Timely Return

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

Arnold Schwarzenegger as Ben Richards is the newest star of the most dangerous game show, The Running Man, where he can earn his freedom or die trying. Navigating his way through a course littered with “Stalkers” who offer video game-style boss battles, Richards must also sabotage the totalitarian government he’s found himself at the whims of. Paul Michael Glaser’s The Running Man bottles up all the absurdity lovingly found in any great ‘80s action flick, offering glorious singlets and operatic enemies that glow as though they just stepped off the set of Tron, but uncorking it almost 40 years later proves that some of the absurdity has matured into a shockingly accurate dystopian satire.

By 2017, America is experiencing extreme resource scarcity and has been pushed into a police-state (I’m talking about the movie here). State-controlled media runs everything, with the Justice Department needing an Entertainment Division to keep order, as the only thing that brings the struggling masses any joy is watching someone get it worse than they did. At this point the show is a worldwide hit and betting on it seems to be a necessary part of survival for some (with sports betting widely available), it’s hard to picture what tomorrow would look like in this world if their beloved show was suddenly canceled.

The audience cheers for his inevitable death as Richards is rocket-propelled into the course with his two fellow rebels who also escaped the work camp. Eighteen months earlier, Richards was a police captain flying a helicopter to a hunger riot, but he refused orders to massacre the crowd. Introduced on the show as the “Butcher of Bakersfield,” we see a re-edited version of the helicopter incident, showing Richards acting alone in the terrorism that unfolded; the nation has been fed this story and their hatred turns to excitement as he enters the modern coliseum. Seems a bit dark to imagine government officers killing unarmed protesters then using the media to paint a different narrative to the masses. Right?

Hosting The Running Man is Damon Killian—brilliantly played by Richard Dawson—the original host of Family Feud. He runs circles around everyone with his half-drunken, over the top intensity while off-air and the charm and whimsy of a real game show host while on-air for the televised gladiator fight. 

The show’s appeal is vast, offering merch for kids and the whole family through incessant ad breaks, The Running Man sets a tone that clashes beautifully with the violence it promises and delivers. The first Stalker to be sent out to kill Richards is a cuddly crowd favorite known as “Sub Zero,” introduced with an adorable smile. Interacting with audience members throughout like a good host, Killian zeroes in on an older lady who seems to be a regular, and her bloodlust grows infectious through the audience. Grandma needs her daily dose of bloodshed. Who is this show for? With violence normalized through their broken society, the market seems to have really opened up for this kind of programming.

At one point they lose coverage of Richards, but the show must go on! Killian has actors go out and perform a fight, but all they’re really capturing is reference footage so they can use “Richards' image . . . mapped onto the stunt double,” giving the illusion to Killian’s audience that Richards has been dramatically killed on the show, just as planned. The sequence feels far too close to modern deepfakes and extends the air of unreality that exists in their world, where everything’s authenticity should probably be challenged.

Making us feel a bit like the rabid audience, The Running Man doesn’t shy away from building a ridiculous world for us to enjoy amidst the dystopia, the Stalkers being a highlight in the lore here. One arrives on ice skates and another shoots electricity while singing opera, all overly confident they can take on a dude the size of Arnie. There is undeniable production value to appreciate here, I’m sure not all the audience members are monsters. Reserve Stalkers wait in a staging area in various states of undress as they put on their WWE-style costumes, impatient to see if they’ll be called up next. Shoulder pads tremble as the crowd begins to cheer on Richards’ next kill.

Written under Stephen King’s pseudonym Richard Bachman, the original novel is set in 2025.  Scott Pilgrim vs. the World director Edgar Wright is releasing his own adaptation to be released later this year with Glen Powell in the lead role, Colman Domingo as our host, and Josh Brolin playing Killian as a more book-accurate Producer of the deadly show. Unfortunately for us, it couldn’t be a more relevant property to revive, with the novel’s protagonist willingly entering the show to provide funds for his struggling family. Who of us here hasn’t wished they could risk body and spirit in a Mr. Beast video just for a chance to pay off some debt? With all the changes to come our way in 2025, it will be interesting to see how Wright takes the opportunity to make his dystopian predictions through this adaptation, and we’ll be left to fear how those ideas, maybe even jokes, might one day be baked into our reality.

Each year we find new and creative ways to approach a reality that mirrors a dystopian Schwarzenegger movie, which one will we reach first: The Running Man or Total Recall? For a near-future dystopia, The Running Man unfortunately hits a bit too close to home nowadays, but Arnie’s one-liners and Dawson’s perfection as our host allows the fun in this dystopia to age well too.

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