Glen Powell, one of our favourite – yet still, somehow, underrated – rising stars has been tapped to star in Paramount’s The Running Man, a new adaptation of the Stephen King novel that Edgar Wright is set to direct. Wright has been attached to the project since 2021, and is producing alongside Nira Park and Simon Kinberg.

King’s The Running Man was famously adapted in 1987, and starred a gold lycra-clad Arnold Schwarzenegger. The novel was set in 2025 in an America under a totalitarian regime (please, let this not be a prediction of the 2024 election results) that uses violent game shows to placate the disenfranchised masses (too close…). One man, needing money to save his sick daughter, joins the most popular show, “The Running Man”, in which teams of killers hunt down contestants. The longer one survives, the more money that person can take away. But as the game show’s producers and killers will soon find out, it only takes one desperate man to break all the rules and expose the show’s dark secrets.

Wright co-wrote the new script alongside Michael Bacall. It’s already shaping up to be a winning year for Glen Powell, coming off the hit rom-com Anyone but You, and looking ahead to his excellent action-comedy Hit Man, directed by Richard Linklater and which the star co-wrote, and to Universal’s Twisters, in which he stars opposite Daisy Edgar-Jones, Anthony Ramos and David Conrenswet. The Running Man reunites Powell and Paramount for the first time since his breakout role as Hangman in Top Gun: Maverick.