The Running Man Rips Into Reality TV. It Should've Been About the Internet.

"When Stephen King published The Running Man under his pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1982, he set his story - about a bleak America where the desperate are hunted to the death on national television - at a time far enough away to make our country's transformation into a totalitarian hellhole plausible, but close enough for it to serve as a warning. He opted for the year 2025,"

"We made it to the dystopian future, now where are our greige jumpsuits and brutalist tower blocks? Our current reality may not be as bad as the one that Ben Richards (Glen Powell) inhabits, where his daughter might die of the flu because legitimate medication is impossible to access in the slums, and where his wife, Sheila (Jayme Lawson), is getting pushed unwillingly toward sex work to support their household because he's been blacklisted by the corporation that owns almost everything."

"But it's not exactly going great. Our incomes are also wildly unequal, our access to health care terrible, and our belief in the possibility of making a living has been so eroded that assorted forms of gambling look like the best alternative. And, like the public in The Running Man, we watch endless amounts of media that's manipulative, misleading, and incites spite and division - it's just not on television, the medium around which the movie revolves."

A dystopian tale set in 2025 imagines a bleak America where desperate people are hunted on national television and social control is normalized. The new film adaptation arrives in that year and echoes cultural warnings about totalitarian drift. The protagonist, Ben Richards, endures corporate domination that blocks access to medicine, blacklists workers, and forces family members toward sex work to survive. Contemporary society shares similar ailments: extreme income inequality, insecure healthcare, eroded prospects for earning, and pervasive manipulative media. The film's emphasis on television as a control mechanism feels outdated compared with internet-driven misinformation and reality-media hybridization.

Read at Vulture