During the lead up to the release of Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, the studio behind this adaptation—Paramount Pictures—kept making fascistic business moves that underlined the irony that it was backing a Running Man movie. Those who knew the story of Stephen King’s 2025-set novel were left wondering: Was one of the first films released under the Paramount Skydance banner going to water down the source’s anger at an exploitative media monopoly, or did the company simply not care that it was releasing a blockbuster where it was very clearly the villain? The answer, incredibly, seems to be both.
In Wright’s take on The Running Man, the villainous, hyper-conservative, cartoonishly patriotic Network fakes its news and reality shows alike as it dominates every facet of dystopian life. Its killer programs air on Free-Vee (not to be confused with Amazon’s old streamer) and offer Idiocracy-like content to keep its oppressed viewership complacent, distracted, and fighting amongst themselves. Members of the upper crust are called “execs.” Poor folks live in Slumside. Get it?
Though the full bleakness of their lives is only alluded to, members of this underclass who step out of line—like Glen Powell’s Ben Richards did by speaking to a union rep—are blacklisted from Network subsidiaries…which is pretty much every employer. This desperation in the face of ludicrous income inequality and corporate control is what leads Richards to try out for The Running Man game show.
The broad strokes of the plot see Richards inexplicably become a figure of toothless rebellion for the masses. Perhaps the film’s defining tonal moment is Michael Cera’s militarized dissident earnestly calling for revolution, then slurping from a can of Monster like a Wayne’s World bit. King’s rage becomes the butt of a cynical joke, garishly sponsored. And even though Richards does eventually go—to use a modern reference—full Luigi (and Cera’s character fries a few masked cops), the film is disappointingly hollow in its artless sentimentality, even if it all wasn’t coming from a big-budget reboot starring Tom Cruise’s hand-selected heir. More than that, it’s who put up the budget in the first place that makes this iteration of The Running Man into a disconcerting metatext.
Paramount, in the last year, has:
So, to summarize: Paramount and its subsidiaries have spent 2025 blacklisting and silencing the opposition from within and without, pissing all over free speech, attempting to shape the news to their favor, and paying off the government—all in service of gaining more control over more of the media landscape. All it needs are some color-coded jumpsuits and the company swaps in for the Network even more fittingly than it cosplays as Nazi Germany in The Rehearsal.
How much of this bootlicking and gag-ordering took place before The Running Man wrapped production on March 28? How about by the time the picture was locked? How much executive influence came down from above before Wright released his least-recognizable film yet? Maybe the outside events of the business side of things had very little impact on this movie. Maybe there’ll be a nice big tell-all that’ll drop in a few years, documenting how this was the last watered-down drop of anti-establishment sentiment to drip from Paramount before Ellison permanently squeezed that valve shut. But the takeaway, even assuming that there aren’t any sinister behind-the-scenes details to know, is a sense of defeated absurdity—if our half-hearted fight-the-power films are coming from the company taking Hollywood’s most prominent right turn, how are they supposed to feel like anything other than the kind of placating entertainment pushed out on Free-Vee?
