It appears that Edgar Wright's (Baby Driver, Shaun of the Dead) adaptation of The Running Man is at last progressing at Paramount after a protracted wait.
Wright's directing, Michael Bacall (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, 21 Jump Street) wrote the script for the reboot, and we now have a leading man.
The project was first announced on February 19, 2021, with little other details to emerge since.
But Glen Powell, star of Top Gun: Maverick and Twisters, will play the lead, the studio disclosed at its CinemaCon presentation in Las Vegas.
Deadline film reporter Justin Kroll revealed on X (formerly known as Twitter), that Chris Evans, Ryan Gosling, and Chris Hemsworth all met for the role but Wright and Paramount ended up selecting Powell.
Wright's remake is said to be more faithful to the Stephen King (King wrote the novel under the pen name, Richard Bachman) novel as opposed to the 1987 film, which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Although both Stephen King's novel Running Man and the Arnold Schwarzenegger film revolve around the idea of a lethal game show, they are very different from one another.
In the novel, Ben Richards is an out-of-shape everyman, down on his luck and hoping to earn money for his wife and children.
Schwarzenegger, on the other hand, portrays a powerful former police captain who is forced to take part in the lethal games after being falsely accused of a crime he did not commit.
Are you excited for The Running Man remake? And do you think the studio made a good choice in selecting Powell over some of the heavy hitters listed above? Let us know in the comment section below.
The Running Man (1987) Synopsis: In a dystopian America, the country totalitarian state where the favorite television program is "The Running Man" -- a game show in which prisoners must run to freedom to avoid a brutal death. Having been made a scapegoat by the government, an imprisoned Ben Richards (Arnold Schwarzenegger) has the opportunity to make it back to the outside again by being a contestant on the deadly show, although the twisted host, Damon Killian (Richard Dawson), has no intention of letting him escape.