Edgar Wright’s 2025 Stephen King adaptation The Running Man has an ending designed to satisfy audiences eager for payback, after watching down-on-his-luck protagonist Ben Richards (Glen Powell) suffer for more than two straight hours. Wright’s version follows in the footsteps of Paul Michael Glaser’s 1987 adaptation, which also gives the story a big, explosive ending. Both of those movies fulfil expectations for a big-budget blockbuster action movie — they’re designed to send the audience out the door feeling righteously satisfied about the triumph of good over evil, the underdog over the fat cats, the dragon-slayer over the dragon.
But both those movie endings miss the different, darker kind of satisfaction that comes from the much grimmer ending of King’s novel, published in 1982 under his Richard Bachman pseudonym. There’s a rote, business-as-expected quality to the ending of both movie adaptations. Glaser’s version, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Ben Richards role, gives the character a more neatly packaged happily-ever-after, while Wright’s version is more chaotic and uncertain. Still, they hit roughly the same notes.
King’s book lands differently. It’s darker, sadder, and more powerful, and it hits home emotionally in a way neither movie can manage. In the process, it leans into the story themes that both movie versions squirm away from confronting. At the same time, it’s obvious why no film studio would keep King’s ending on the movie. Here’s why.
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for the endings of all three versions of The Running Man.]
How does the 2025 movie The Running Man end?
In all three versions of The Running Man, protagonist Ben Richards is in such a desperate situation that he risks his life on a lethal game show where heavily armed flunkies murder contestants for sport, on behalf of cheering crowds pumped up by propaganda and lies about the competitors. Glaser’s adaptation radically changes the storyline, the main character, and the central themes — we’ll address that later. Wright’s version, on the other hand, sticks closely to King’s version for about three-fourths of its run time. It’s such a loyal adaptation in most of the story beats that the sudden veer into original material at the end is even more striking and odd.
In King’s version and Wright’s adaptation, Richards is living in grinding poverty with his wife Sheila and their sick toddler, Cathy. He’s a blue-collar worker who can’t keep a job, due to heavy underemployment, systemic poverty, dystopic oppression, and his own inability to keep his head down and ignore the abuse and victimization of his co-workers. When he tries to earn money for Cathy’s medical treatment through the predatory game shows broadcast by Free-Vee — possibly the only TV channel left, and certainly the most powerful one — a producer named Killian (Josh Brolin in Wright’s movie) earmarks him for the TV show The Running Man, claiming that Richards’ simmering anger will make great TV.
Richards is given stake money and allowed a head start to flee the Hunters, who will kill him if they catch him. Much of the body of both versions follows him from city to city, as he hides in seedy hotels and among sympathetic rebels fighting back against the disinformation society they live in, and its brutally dehumanizing bread-and-circuses distractions, like The Running Man. Richards thinks about Sheila and Cathy constantly throughout his episodic adventures, as he fights back against the Hunters and witnesses how Killian doctors his footage of Richards to make him seem like a hateful criminal sociopath, so The Running Man’s audience can feel righteous and powerful over seeing him chased and killed.
Eventually, as the Hunters close in, Richards takes a hostage, Amelia Williams (Emilia Jones in Wright’s movie), pretends he’s carrying explosives, and uses the threat of his bomb to commandeer a plane, with Amelia and lead Hunter McCone (Lee Pace) on board. In both the book and the movie, Killian betrays McCone by offering Richards the lead Hunter job, saying Richards’ resourcefulness and dramatic instincts in surviving The Running Man have hugely boosted ratings, and earned him a fandom.
Here’s where the two versions sharply depart: In the movie, Richards says his family wouldn’t be safe if he became a Hunter, but Killian tells him that McCone and his Hunters already murdered Sheila and Cathy, to avenge a Hunter that Richards killed earlier in the movie. Killian even shows Richards footage of that supposed attack. This gives Richards the motive to take down McCone, though he still wavers on whether he believes Killian’s narrative, since he knows how easily Killian can fabricate believable video.
But Richards refuses to become a network-sponsored murderer, and tries to crash his plane into Free-Vee headquarters. Killian has the plane shot down, heedless of the city blocks the wreckage will destroy. Richards survives, apparently (as communicated in blurry footage on a viral videotape vlog) fleeing the wreckage in an escape pod. He somehow finds Sheila (Jayme Lawson) and Cathy, who are alive and living in comfort and safety: They presumably got their network payout for Richard’s Running Man appearance as promised, and graduated to the upper class. (Apparently this version of the show and Killian aren’t as crooked and petty as the Glaser version, which kills off any contestants who survive the Hunters.)
Shortly after that, the Running Man audience, radicalized by their fandom for Richards, erupts in violence against Killian and the network. Molotov cocktails are thrown. (The Network apparently has incompetent or maybe just bribeable security for its live-audience tapings.) A riot breaks out. And Richards, who sneaked into the Network building (again, terrible security), kills Killian, with his gunshot marking a dramatic cut to credits.
That ending feels audience-safe and studio-approved: Richards refuses to accept Killian’s devil’s bargain, which asks him to become part of the monstrous system that tortured and oppressed him, in exchange for wealth, comfort, and (supposed) security. Instead, he gets everything he wants: His wife and child are safe, healthy, and happy. The Running Man’s fans are revolting against Free-Vee, and Killian gets his comeuppance. But it all feels rushed, ragged, poorly justified, and hard to believe, like a happily-ever-after fever dream Richards experiences just before Killian blows him out of the sky. Note: I’m not arguing that that’s true, the way I think it was with the rewritten movie ending of King’s novel The Long Walk. I just don’t think it feels nearly as real or as emotionally powerful as the ending of the novel.
How does Stephen King’s novel end?
While Wright’s version follows King’s book in the broad plot particulars up until that ending, it’s still a darker, deeper experience throughout. Working in print, King has a lot more room for world-building, and he lays out a clearer picture of the dystopic details of this near-future world. Reading it today is particularly depressing because of the sense that nothing he was concerned about 40 years ago has gotten better, and all of it has gotten worse over the past year in particular, from soaring wealth inequity to the ruling class’ use of rage-baiting propaganda and doctored information to the active gutting of government oversight of corporations dumping pollutants into the air and water. Even the suppression of scientific research and tracking of pollutants that’s been happening in 2025 is covered in King’s book.
King openly acknowledges in The Running Man that these are all systemic, eternal problems rather than fresh new ones: When a rebel says he sees a revolution coming, with “a bad day for the maggots with their guts full of roast beef,” Richards wearily responds, “People have been seeing those things for two thousand years.” Elsewhere, he looks around at the people living in poverty and thinks about Jesus telling his disciples that there will always be poor people in the world.
That sense of fatalistic realism, the acknowledgment that Richards isn’t going to fix a broken system just by killing the producer behind a game show, extends to the end of the book. A major difference is that Killian still tells Richards that his wife and child are dead, but that isn’t a lie, and there’s no pretense that McCone killed them: They were both stabbed to death in their slum apartment. Killian suggests the invaders were prowlers and addicts, possibly looking for a score, but Richards wonders if they were johns, because he knows Sheila has been moonlighting as a sex worker to make ends meet. Regardless, they died nearly two weeks ago, while Richards was in hiding, risking his life for them.
The randomness of their deaths is both sad and believable — an acknowledgment that wealthy people enjoy a level of security and safety that people living hand-to-mouth can only dream of, and that “poverty violence” is just one more threat facing people on the wrong side of wealth inequity. It’s also a dark irony that underlines what King has been doing with the book all along, in constantly underlining the callousness and cynicism of people like Killian, who prey on people like Richards and his family while monopolizing the resources that could save them.
Killian pretends he sympathizes with Richards and is sorry about his family, but Killian could have easily prevented their deaths by moving them somewhere safe when Richards signed onto the show. (His counterpart promises to do that in the movie, though the truth of what happens is pretty vague.) The fact that he doesn’t suggests that Killian knew the game was rigged, that there was no chance Richards might win, or that Sheila might get the grand prize.
As in the movie, Richards fights McCone on the plane, kills the Hunter, sees Amelia off with a parachute, and takes out the pilots. But in King’s version, McCone manages to gut-shoot Richards, who’s already in the process of bleeding out from wounds he sustained earlier in the book. Knowing he’s dying, Richards pilots the plane into the Free-Vee building. (He spends a few pages improbably stumbling around the plane, stepping on his own dangling intestines and getting them hung up on corpses first.) Killian looks out of his window just in time to see the plane roaring toward him, and even somehow makes eye contact with Richards. The book ends on the line “The explosion was tremendous, lighting up the night like the wrath of God, and it rained fire twenty blocks away.”
It’s easy to see why Hollywood studios would reject an ending like that, especially in 2025. Even if Hollywood wasn’t largely allergic to this kind of tragic, Pyrrhic grim ending, it may be many generations before a 9/11-traumatized society is ready to take the imagery of a man slamming a plane into a building as heroism rather than horror.
But King’s ending doesn’t pretend that Richards has fixed any problem with society, or even necessarily ended the threat of Free-Vee or guaranteed there won’t be another season of The Running Man. It doesn’t offer a major societal shift toward Ben Richards fandom, or toward any kind of happily-ever-after for anyone. It just acknowledges, in a blunt, brutal way, that there’s no polite or simple way to fight back against powermongers who take advantage of humanity’s worst, most selfish, and most self-righteous impulses in order to consolidate wealth and clout, and sometimes the most we can do is put our own bodies on the line against them.
How does the 1987 Running Man end?
Glaser’s version of the story, with Schwarzenegger in the lead role, changes nearly everything about the story except the idea of a lethal game show, with Killian as the mastermind behind it. In this version, Richards is a military officer framed (again, via doctored footage used as propaganda) for a civilian massacre he actually tried to stop. Sent to a military prison camp, he escapes, and when he’s recaptured, Killian (longtime game-show host Richard Dawson) recruits him for The Running Man.
In this version of the story, the game takes place in a designated kill-zone arena in L.A., and looks something like a Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat game, with colorful costumes and personas for the Hunters, and smirky kill-lines for Schwarzenegger. (“What happened to [that guy you just cut in half]?” “He had to split.”) Richards gets help from a broadcast journalist, Amber (María Conchita Alonso), who helps him expose that the Running Man game is rigged, and broadcasts the unedited tape that proves he was framed for the massacre. Richards joins the resistance, they force their way into the TV station, and Richards straps Killian into one of the rocket sleds that send contestants through underground tunnels into the game arena. When Killian arrives in the zone, he hits a wall and dramatically explodes.
This version of the story ditches most of the concepts that King was exploring. The entire idea of Richards being willing to risk his life for his family is gone: Schwarzenegger is more or less a lone-wolf tough guy with none of the original character’s soulful humanity. Glaser hints at the idea of systematic oppression and poverty throughout the film — the massacre Schwarzenegger is framed for was an attempt to suppress the populace during a “food riot” — but it isn’t a major focus, and removing the game to a designated area means Richards spends a lot less time in any recognizable or relatable setting.
Which is why it feels so odd that Wright’s version of the movie, which does zoom in on King’s character and story details, and explores so much of what he was trying to do, still winds up with an ending that’s straight out of the glossy 1980s version of the movie. It feels like a betrayal of King’s book in a way the Schwarzenegger film doesn’t, because it respects King’s intentions, then tosses a simplistic ending onto a complicated setting. We’re never likely to see King’s book adapted quite as he wrote it, but Wright’s movie feels like a strange compromise that walks right up to the edge of the kind of gutsiness that made King a household name, then — true to the book and movie’s title — runs away at the last minute.
