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It sounds like a fever dream when you say it out loud, but Edgar Wright really is planning to remake the one and only Stephen King adaptation that starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, which fired its original director after two weeks and replaced him with one half of iconic TV duo Starsky & Hutch, but that’s where we’re at with The Running Man.
Of course, the original novel was heavily altered so that it would be more in line with the Austrian Oak’s style and sensibilities, and the enduring cult classic originally penned by the legendary horror author under pseudonym Richard Bachman endures more than 35 years on as a wonderfully over-the-top cult classic drenched in the most delicious of cheese.
Suffice to say, Wright’s in-development do-over that was first announced almost two years ago will hew much closer to the source material than Arnold’s did, but whether or not you find that to be a positive or a negative, producer Simon Kinberg did at least provide a solid update on its current status in an interview with SlashFilm.
“Yeah, he’s one of my favorite directors of all time and one of my favorite people, just a super great guy. Obviously a cinephile. We are working on it actively. He’s actively working on the script with Michael Bacall. And our hope would be that it is a movie that, again, all fingers crossed and luck and everything else go our way, that Edgar could maybe direct next year.
Well, what’s cool is that Edgar, completely separately, before myself and Paramount started down the journey of figuring out how to get the remake rights, which was complicated, he had tweeted, just on his own — and I follow him obviously on every possible platform — he had tweeted that if there was one movie he would remake ever, it was Running Man.”
Schwarzenegger’s Running Man will always hold a special place in the hearts of many, but however it turns out, we can expect Wright’s iteration to be markedly different in almost every way. Based on his track record, it’s got every chance of becoming the definitive take, too.