The Running Man ending explained: Edgar Wright reveals why he changed Stephen King’s original conclusion

Filmmaker unpacks how bringing author’s vision to screen in 2025 reshaped story’s climax, and why a darker path from the book no longer felt right

Glen Powell, second right, and Colman Domingo, right, face off in The Running Man. Photo: Paramount Pictures

Fans of Stephen King, rejoice. Edgar Wright’s The Running Man arrives as a faithful adaptation the author's 1982 novel, reclaiming the tone and political edge largely softened in the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film.

But even as Wright returns to the book’s original spirit, he makes one significant change – its ending.

Speaking to The National, Wright says the team never considered using King’s original finale, a brutally dark final act that has long shocked readers.

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“We were never going to do the ending in the book for reasons that I hope are obvious,” he says. “It wasn’t a case of toning anything down. We just didn’t want to do that exact ending. Something quite as bleak and nihilistic as that isn’t the ending that feels right for today. Stephen King was happy we changed it.”

But what did he change, and why did he change it? Let's break it down.

Warning: this article contains spoilers

A story set in 2025 – landing in the actual 2025

King drafted The Running Man in the early 1970s, published it under his Richard Bachman pseudonym in 1982 and set it in what then seemed like an exaggerated dystopia: the year 2025. The book imagined a society hollowed out by economic collapse, media manipulation and state-sanctioned spectacle. More than 40 years later, Wright is releasing his version into the very year the novel predicted – one in which those ideas feel less like science fiction and more like commentary.

The original ending to The Running Man was far more bleak, and Edgar Wright changed it to suit the times, he explains. Photo: Paramount Pictures

“The disturbing thing is how little has changed,” Wright says. “We started the script in early 2022, and you can’t help that life is catching up fast. The best genre storytelling holds a funhouse mirror up to reality, and the line between the two is very thin right now.”

That alignment – an imagined future colliding with the present – shaped how Wright approached the film’s conclusion.

How the novel and film reach their final moments

In King’s novel, Ben Richards is a struggling father who enters a televised manhunt to earn money for his sick daughter. Instead of an arena, the world itself becomes the battleground: Richards must evade professional Hunters while the public reports his whereabouts for cash. As the Games Network twists the narrative and the stakes rise, Richards becomes determined to expose the institution exploiting him.

Wright’s film restores much of this structure – the class politics, the media machinery, the sense of a society complicit in its own entertainment – but reshapes how the story accelerates towards its breaking point. In both versions, Richards ends up hijacking an aircraft. What happens next is where the stories diverge entirely.

Why the endings differ sharply

In the novel, Richards storms a passenger jet, kills the flight crew and the lead Hunter, and sets the autopilot on a collision course with the Games Network tower. He dies in the explosion, killing Network executive Dan Killian. It is annihilation as protest – a scorched-earth ending rooted in the fatalism of its era.

Glen Powell, left, stars in the adaptation by director Edgar Wright, right, of The Running Man. AP

Wright’s film reframes the scene. Richards still finds himself on a stolen plane, but the Network uses it to vilify him. Claiming he intends to attack its headquarters, it shoots the aircraft down with a missile and broadcasts his apparent death as an act of terrorism. In truth, Richards survives the crash, escapes and reunites with his family. Instead of a martyr destroyed by the system, he becomes a living symbol of resistance against it.

One ending embraces obliteration. The other seeks the possibility of change.

Why the new ending speaks to now

Wright avoids offering a literal decoding of the finale, but his comments point towards a broader purpose. King’s original ending belonged to a moment when dystopia still functioned as metaphor and despair was central to the genre’s tone. Now that many of the book’s anxieties – collapsing institutions, manipulated reality, a public numbed by spectacle – feel familiar in 2025, a self-immolating ending lands differently.

In the book, the hero sacrifices himself to take out the villain, played in the film by Josh Brolin, right. Photo: Paramount Pictures

By letting Richards live, the film rejects the idea that the only response to a broken system is to go down with it.

“We wanted to come up with an ending that the same fire to it, but just in a different way,” says Wright.

Instead, the adaptation argues that survival can be its own act of defiance – a way of insisting that humanity can still push back against the machinery designed to exploit it. If King’s version ends with a world beyond saving, Wright’s suggests that resistance remains possible.

Will there be a sequel?

As for a sequel, Wright says he hasn’t had time to consider it.

“I only finished the film last week,” he says. “I’m still living in it. It’s crazy that the film is set in 2025 and we managed to get it out in the last six weeks of 2025.”

But the ending he has chosen leaves the story open in a way King’s novel never did – and audiences may be curious to see where Richards’ fight goes next.