Nearly 40 years after Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Running Man, a new 2025 adaptation hits cinemas, promising a darker, more faithful take on the Stephen King novel, with Edgar Wright in the director’s chair and Glenn Powell in the lead.

So… what went wrong?

In this Fast Forward episode, GB and AJ break down why The Running Man (2025) never quite works.

From a muddled tone and flat world-building to a lead character we struggle to care about, this remake somehow manages to be neither fun nor brutal. We also dig into the “Arnie problem”, whether Glenn Powell was miscast, and why the film never feels like an Edgar Wright movie at all. Maybe he was just the wrong person to direct this. And we LOVE Edgar.

We went in hopeful. We left apologising to the people we dragged along.

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