The Running Man (1987)
The Running Man is a 1987 American dystopian action film directed by Paul Michael Glaser and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, María Conchita Alonso, Richard Dawson, Yaphet Kotto, and Jesse Ventura. The film’s story about a television show where convicted criminal “runners” must escape death at the hands of professional killers is very loosely based on the 1982 novel of the same name written by Stephen King and published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. A lawsuit determined the movie was plagiarized from the French movie Le prix du danger (1983) which was made after Robert Sheckley’s 1958 short story “The Prize of Peril”, just like the 1970 German TV movie Das Millionenspiel. The 1987 US film is set in a dystopian United States between 2017 and 2019. The Running Man was a moderate box office success in the United States, grossing $38 million on its $27 million budget, but opened to mixed reviews from critics. A new movie adaptation of the novel, announced in early 2021, is in development at Paramount Pictures, with Edgar Wright directing and Michael Bacall writing the script.
Plot.
By 2017, the United States has become a totalitarian police state following a worldwide economic collapse and the recent election. The government pacifies the populace through violent TV shows; its most popular being The Running Man, a broadcast game show, where criminals fight for their lives as “runners”, fleeing from armed mercenaries named the “stalkers”, to earn a government pardon. Ben Richards, a police helicopter pilot, is framed for a massacre during a food riot in Bakersfield, California. He is arrested by his colleagues and put in a labor camp. Eighteen months later, he escapes with two resistance fighters, Harold Weiss and William Laughlin, finding refuge in their camp, led by their leader Mic. The resistance group look to hijack the ICS broadcast network’s uplink facilities to expose the government’s lies. Richards declines to help, then heads to his brother’s apartment, finding it is now occupied by Amber Mendez, a composer, learning his brother was sent to a re-education camp.
Richards takes Mendez hostage to flee to Hawaii, but is arrested at the airport when Mendez alerts security. Richards meets Damon Killian, the charismatic but ruthless host of The Running Man. Killian coerces Richards to participate in the show, in exchange for Weiss and Laughlin’s freedom. Meanwhile, Amber sees a news report that Richards killed people at the airport, which she knows to be untrue. However, as the game begins, Killian sends all three men into the game show arena, an abandoned part of Los Angeles. They are attacked by Professor Subzero, but Richards garrotes him with a piece of a razor wire fencing, making it the first time a stalker has died on the show.
Mendez finds the original, unedited footage of the Bakersfield massacre. However, she is caught and sent into the game zone. Joined by Mendez—Richards, Weiss, and Laughlin search for the uplink. Killian deploys two stalkers—Buzzsaw and Dynamo—to kill the four runners.
Production.
Christopher Reeve was once attached to play Ben Richards. In a 2015 interview about the film, Paul Michael Glaser says that he was originally approached to direct the film but declined because he felt that the pre-production period was insufficient. Director Andrew Davis was hired instead but fired after two weeks because the production was by that time behind schedule by one week, so Glaser was rehired. Schwarzenegger has stated this was a “terrible decision”, as Glaser “shot the movie like it was a television show, losing all the deeper themes.” L.A. Weekly stated that the film’s tone changed from a dark allegory to a humorous action film with the change of the film’s star. With Reeve, The Running Man was about an unemployed man who goes on a violent game show for a thirty-day period to feed his family. With Glaser and Schwarzenegger, the protagonist became a condemned, but innocent, criminal forced into a three-hour gladiator-style game show by the justice system. Screenwriter Steven E. de Souza wrote fifteen drafts of the script over the course of the film’s development.