Movie rights to ‘The Running Man’ were sold without the producer knowing Stephen King wrote it

Movie audiences were thrilled this week by the first trailer for the Glen Powell-led update of the 1980s sci-fi action thriller The Running Man. (And you should run to check out EW’s exclusive pics and stories from the set, if you have not already done so.)

Director Edgar Wright, best known for Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, has assembled an outstanding cast to join Powell on his race against televised predatory capitalism, including Josh Brolin, Michael Cera, Katy O’Brian, Lee Pace, William H. Macy, Emilia Jones, and Colman Domingo. Looking at the initial promotional clip, you’ll definitely see many similarities to the first film, but there are actually some considerable differences.

Wright’s movie, which he wrote with his Scott Pilgrim vs. the World collaborator Michael Bacall, who also helped bring 21 Jump Street to the screen, is actually much closer to the original Stephen King novel upon which it is based.

“Wait, hold up,” you might be thinking. “The Running Man, with a spandex-clad Arnold Schwarzenegger and Yaphet Kotto tormented by the guy from Family Feud was written by Stephen King?” Well, if you didn’t know, don’t feel bad. In fact, the producer of the original movie had no clue until he was purchasing the rights.

The Running Man, in which economically desperate people participate in a deadly game show, was first published in 1982 by one Richard Bachman, the fourth of an eventual seven of Bachman’s novels. At the time of its release, no one knew this was a pseudonym.

King, already a success with Carrie and ‘Salem’s Lot, was worried about oversaturating the market early in his career, but his prolific pen kept moving. He also enjoyed knowing that his work was accepted by publishers on its own terms, not just the value of his commodified name.

The classic rock-loving master of horror, inspired by the group Bachman-Turner Overdrive, selected the pen name for his alternating works. He would have kept going as both King and Bachman (indeed, Misery was intended as a Bachman book) if it weren’t for a snooping Washington, D.C., bookseller who suspected something was up. (Bachman, “died of exposure,” in 1985, and later Bachman books have been “published posthumously.”)

Though by the mid-1980s Hollywood was pumping out King adaptations at a ferocious pace, there had yet to be a movie based on one of Bachman’s works. (Since then, there’s been a film version of Thinner and later this year we’ll see The Long Walk.) As such, when young producer Rob Cohen (later the director of the first The Fast and the Furious film) sought to acquire the adaptation rights to the property, he had no idea what he was getting himself into.

In a 2019 interview with SFX Magazine, The Running Man‘s screenwriter Steven E. de Souza said that Cohen did not know Bachman’s true identity.

“[He] was wondering why the rights were so expensive,” de Souza, who also wrote 48 Hrs. and Die Hard, said.

Originally the film was going to star Christopher Reeve and stick with the very bleak tone of the book. Over time, Schwarzenegger was cast, the timeline was compressed from a month to one night, and the character is wrongfully accused of a crime and forced to compete, he does not volunteer. The finished film, directed by Paul Michael Glaser, a television veteran (and costar of Starsky & Hutch!) coming off his first feature Band of the Hand, has much more of a WWE quality to it than dour realism.

Even though the Bachman secret was out by the time The Running Man hit theaters, King insisted that his pseudonym got the on-screen credit. (But if de Souza’s story is to be believed, he still took a King’s ransom for the rights!)

The new movie’s trailer, however, buries Bachman for good. The phrase “BASED ON THE NOVEL BY STEPHEN KING” gets the all caps treatment midway through, and it gives every indication the film will stay true to the book’s plot. (There’s no way in hell it keeps the same ending, though. Wright has done some chancy things, but there’s no way he can do [SPOILER REMOVED]!

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For nostalgia’s sake, here’s the trailer for the 1987 version.