This article contains spoilers for running Man (2025).
At the end of Edgar Wright's adaptation of Stephen King and Richard Bachman's The Running Man, a number of burning questions remain. How effective is the revolution fueled by Ben Richards (Glen Powell)? What happened to Amelia Williams (Emilia Jones) after she jumped out of the plane? But the only question that burns brighter than the boarding house illuminated by randomly lit adult magazines is: why isn't Pennywise the Dancing Clown in The Running Man?
Okay, this probably takes some explanation, so let's take a step back. This newest version of The Running Man takes place in the near future as we follow Richards as he runs as part of the main game show. He must stay alive for 30 days while the world reports him and elite Hunters, including the masked McCone (Lee Pace), hunt him down. Throughout the two-hour film, Richards travels up and down the East Coast, traveling from New York (though unspecified) to Boston and—and this is where Pennywise comes into play—Derry, Maine.
This latter town is a classic fictional location from many of King's stories and novels, first mentioned in his 1981 short story “The Bird and the Album.” After further mentions in “The Running Man”, published under the pseudonym Bachman on May 4, 1982, and in various seasons' “The Body” (later the basis for “Stand by Me”) the same year, it then appeared in “Pet Sematary” in 1983, as well as two other stories. Uncle Otto's Truck (also 1983) and 1984's Mrs. Todd's Shortcut were later collected in the 1985 anthology Skeleton Crew.
While King set more stories in the town of Castle Rock, and only three books were set primarily in Derry itself (including 11/22/63 and Insomnia), there is, of course, one novel that is most associated with the city: 1986's It. You're probably familiar with the premise of it thanks to the resurgent popularity of the novel associated with HBO's prequel series It: Welcome to Derry, but the short version is that there's an evil clown named Pennywise who lives in the sewers and eats children. He is also a supernatural alien/avatar of chaos who is nearly immortal until a group of kids known as the Losers Club yell at him until he dies.
Midway through the new 2025 film adaptation of The Running Man, Richards is sent to what was supposed to be a safe haven thanks to Bradley Throckmorton (Daniel Ezra), a rebel against the Games Network, which controls every aspect of American life and produces the game show The Running Man. Richards turns over the card Throckmorton handed him to reveal the address he's heading to, and if you've seen the film, you've probably heard some laughter of recognition from the audience when it's revealed that he's heading to Derry.
Welcome to… well, you know
Once Richards gets there, he'll do it. No he does not encounter Pennywise at any point, head into the sewers, or visit the house on Neibolt Street that offers access to Pennywise's domain. There are no red balls or other noticeable references to Him; here in The Running Man no one swims because they are too busy running. Instead, Richards heads to the home of Elton Parrakis (Michael Cera), an inventor who publishes magazines in an attempt to disrupt the system and who has a very complicated relationship with hot dogs.
Even though the Derry sequence in the film makes no real connection to the events of It, it's hard to get It out of your head. Parrakis lives with her frantic mother Victoria (Sandra Dickinson), who has suffered from past events in Derry due to her husband – Elton's father – being beaten and killed over his rebellious hot dog cart (there's more to it, but that's the outline). She is also very reminiscent of the Pennywise-victimized adults in It, particularly the sweaty and creepy Mrs. Kersh (Joan Gregson) from It Chapter Two.
To be clear, Victoria is definitely No Pennywise; she's just a crazy old lady. But when Richards and Parrakis are attacked by the police, the episode ends with them sliding down a fireman's pole into the area below Parrakis' house. At this point, it's hard not to think, “Underground in Derry? That's where Pennywise lives!” Sure, it's a secret tunnel and not a sewer, but wouldn't it be cool if Pennywise stuck his scary head out into battle? You know who loves secret tunnels? Pennywise the Dancing Clown!
Not clowning
There are several good reasons why Pennywise No in The Running Man. The simplest, most obvious, and perhaps most boring reason is that these two films, despite both being based on Stephen King novels, are made by two different companies; It, its sequel and the current prequel miniseries are produced by Warner Bros. Discovery and The Running Man was produced by Paramount. While this doesn't necessarily rule out including an It reference in The Running Man, having actor Bill Skorsgård appear in full clown gear would likely be a no-no. Of course, these kinds of character swaps have happened between companies before—read more about the complicated rights between Sony and Disney over Spider-Man—but figuring out contracts to allow the clown to make a brief appearance in an otherwise unrelated film just doesn't make much business sense.
Okay, that wasn't fun, so let's move on to a less dry explanation. One of them? The Running Man takes place in the future. Although the new film doesn't have a specific time period, Arnold Schwarzenegger's original film, which is very different from the book, is set in 2017. Moreover, King and Bachman's book takes place in the unimaginable future of 2025. Regardless of how Wright and Powell's film fits into it, The Running Man takes place outside of any known It timeline, both in the films and in the book; This book is set in 1957-1958 and then 1984-1985, with the latest films taking place in 1988-1989 and 2016.
Why point this out? Well – spoilers for the end of It – The Losers' Club (aka the kids who were tormented by Pennywise) destroy the clown forever when he becomes an adult. Even if for some crazy reason the new Running Man takes place in 2017 and ties into the timeline of the new films, Pennywise was still defeated a year earlier. But given the more likely possibility that The Running Man takes place somewhere in “our” future, it's been years, if not decades, since the Losers' Club cleansed Derry of Pennywise's influence. He can't appear… because he's dead.
Another very good reason there is no Pennywise is that while many of King's books contain references to each other, they are canonically all part of King's multiverse, but No the same direct continuity. It's likely that King dropped some fun Easter eggs for fans throughout his work, but didn't start tying them all together until his landmark fantasy series, The Dark Tower. The simple version presented there is that at the center of the multiverse is the titular Tower, and everything grows out of it like the spokes of a wheel. So, for example, the events of It could canonically happen in both Dreamcatcher and The Mist, but the events of Dreamcatcher did not. No take place in the world of Fog and vice versa. There's even talk of a King multiverse where King exists as a writer, which raises a whole host of other questions. Then there are King's novels and stories that simply exist as they are, unrelated to anything else.
Different knitting needles for different people
Confusing, right? You don't really need to worry about this unless you're a die-hard King fan, and even then it's not all that important to enjoying his novels. Considering that King wrote The Running Man under his pen name Bachman several years before he released It, there's no reason to think that the version of Derry that Richards visits and the version in which Pennywise eats a small child named Georgie are on the same spokes of the wheel anyway. Of course maybe they arebut King has never specified whether Bachman's books, which also include Fury (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadworks (1981), Tonner (1984), The Regulators (1996) and The Flame (2007), are related to his other works, other than mentioning Derry and his existence as a writer in Tinner. (remember, he wrote it as Bachman, so it makes sense).
But the real reason Pennywise isn't in The Running Man? That's because it would be too fun, too cool – perhaps the funniest thing ever put on screen. Edgar Wright didn't include Pennywise the Dancing Clown in The Running Man because, frankly, he's a coward. A braver person would have had Pennywise appear in the tunnel under Parrakis's house and chase Glen Powell for the rest of the film, or at least to the Derry border before he gave up and went looking for kids to grab a bite to eat.
Or how about this? Let Pennywise be one of the participants in the Running Man show! The whole purpose of the game show is supposedly to punish criminals, and Pennywise is a child killer with a thousand-year history. He ideal a candidate to hire Dan Killian (Josh Brolin), the show's producer. However, if you replace Pennywise with Ben Richards, the former will easily win The Running Man. While the film tries to tell us that Richards is a master of disguise thanks to (badly) gluing on a mustache or pretending to be a blind priest, Pennywise can look like anyone and anything at any time. Unlike Powell, who can't seem to hide his chiseled, pleasantly stubbled chin, Pennywise can look like a small child, or one of the Hunters, or even a giant spider clown; the latter would probably attract too much attention, but he could do it if he wanted to. Heck, it could have turned into a mailbox to mail out the daily videotapes that cause Richards so much trouble throughout the film.
Even aside from all this disguise, no one knows the sewers of Derry better than Pennywise. As McCone and his Hunters stumble through the darkness, Pennywise will always be two steps ahead of them, easily evading capture and winning the billion dollar prize at the end of 30 days. What would Pennywise, an ancient being from a race known as the Dead Lights, say? do with that kind of money? It's unclear, but it would be interesting to see.
Can you hear us, Paramount? Get this deal with WBD. People want – no, they demand – Pennywise will appear in the sequel, and we'll see you in the cinema in a few years when The Running Man 2: The Swimming Man Part 1 – Welcome (back) to Derry comes out!
