Glen Powell, naked save for a towel, hangs from a rope in sub-zero Bulgaria, while director Edgar Wright, wearing a hoodie, watches from the ground, drinking espresso.
It’s February, and they’re sprinting toward the end of production on “The Running Man,” the longest, most expensive and coldest shoot of Wright’s career. A few days ago, a blizzard hit the country and covered it with snow. Powell, who stars as a game show contestant in a race to survive in Wright’s adaptation of Stephen King’s dystopian novel, was well aware this scene was coming and had been closely tracking the frigid weather. In it, his character evades a fearsome hunter by jumping out of a hotel window and rappelling down the side of a building with barely a stitch.
“It’s always a temporary pain to the eternal glory of cinema,” Powell jokes.
Director Wright, who built a cult following with Tarantino’s quirky, genre-bending films about laughing gas such as Hot Fuzz and Baby Driver, is meticulous in choreographing his action sequences and obsessed with getting the perfect shot. Powell’s lens is tightly attached to him, and he hangs in a harness for 30 minutes before the camera resets. Director Wright, 51, hopes to pay homage to the endurance test that Bruce Willis was put through in Die Hard by taking John McClane’s barefoot skyscraper antics to the next level.
Bulgaria may sound like a polar region, but it’s nothing compared to Scotland, where “The Running Man” was filmed. “I think he lost circulation in his legs,” Wright said. “I had lots of layers on but it was horribly cold in Glasgow and I didn’t know if it would ever get warm again.”
Eight months later, Wright was relaxing in New York City on an unseasonably warm fall day. There are only five weeks left until Paramount’s “Running Man” is released on November 14th. Wright had just finished signing autographs and taking selfies with the hundreds of New York Comic Con fans who rushed onto the stage at the end of a panel discussion about the film. Comic-Con is chaos in costume, packed with cosplayers resembling the zombie hordes from Wright’s Shaun of the Dead. It’s happening upstairs. Wright is in a quiet dressing room isolated from the commotion, which can only be accessed through a labyrinth of tunnels. This dressing room is stocked with enough pastries and bottles of water to survive this geek apocalypse.
King wrote this action-adventure in 1982, long before social media took the world by storm, and in an ironic twist, he set it in 2025 with real culture and totalitarianism. What once seemed like a dark and distant fantasy now bears eerie similarities to our turbulent present. For Wright, the film is a chance to put a unique spin on the story, which was adapted from the testosterone-soaked 1987 thriller starring Arnold Schwarzenegger at the height of the He-Man era.
Wright’s version is set in the hellish conditions of America’s most popular show, “The Running Man,” a contest that offers $1 billion to contestants who can survive a 30-day nationwide manhunt. There is no prize for second place, only a gruesome death. It’s a nightmarish premise that Wright bases on humanity while providing brave action set-pieces. Part of the change is in the way the main character, Ben Richards, is portrayed. Instead of Schwarzenegger’s steroid-fueled killing machine, Powell plays a struggling father who risks his own life in a desperate bid to make money for his sick child.
“We were shooting all night in the elements,” Powell says. “Edgar wanted to have a brutal vibe.” Before signing up for the project, Powell assured Wright that he was ready for whatever the filmmakers threw at him. “I said, ‘No actor will work as hard for you as I do,'” Powell recalled. “‘I’ll do everything in my power to make sure you get the movie you want.’
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Wright, who grew up in southern England as the son of two artists, first read King’s works as a teenager, sharing paperback editions of “The Night Shift,” “Salem’s Lot,” and “It” with his brother Oscar. To this day, he still has the King collection, with a cracked spine and bent pages.
“Reading King was a formative experience because it was my first time reading something for adults,” he says. “It’s not just horror, it’s got attitude, world-building, and humor.”
In 2017, Wright tweeted that if he could remake any movie, it would be Running Man. Eight years later, he took the chance, but he doesn’t consider his version a remake of the Paul Michael Glaser film. It’s even closer to Dr. King’s dystopian novel.
“That movie is its own thing,” Wright explains. “This is a new adaptation. “A Fistful of Dollars” is an amazing reinterpretation of “Yojimbo.” “The Fly,” directed by David Cronenberg, is a very different take on the ’50s film. It’s a lot of fun because we have two very different movies from the same original story. ”
“Wildly Different” follows Wright’s most recent work since his debut in 2004’s “Shaun of the Dead,” a George Romero-esque zombie outbreak buddy comedy. Stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost became two of Wright’s closest friends, and the three went on to co-create cult favorites Hot Fuzz and At the World’s End. These films offered a distinctly British take on buddy-cop movies and alien invasion movies (with lots of silly asides to go along with the action scenes). Wright quickly built a fan base among a group of writers passionate about American pop culture.
“Peter Jackson, Quentin Tarantino and Sam Raimi saw themselves in Edgar,” Pegg says. “He was encyclopedic about movies. It appealed to their own traditions.”
As Wright rose in stature, major studios began giving him bigger budgets. But his unconventional sensibilities didn’t necessarily match those of the entertainment industry. “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” an ambitious romantic comedy inspired by video games, received rave reviews, but special effects-heavy sequences drove its price tag to nearly $90 million. It failed to attract audiences, and the film grossed only $51.7 million.
But Wright suffered an even more devastating setback, spending eight years developing Marvel’s Ant-Man before seeing the project fall apart when his bespoke vision didn’t mesh well with Disney’s cookie-cutter superhero approach. He wanted to do something outrageous, but after The Avengers was a huge hit at the box office, the studio chose to play it safe.
“At the time, I was excited about the idea of doing this because I wanted to put my own spin on it,” he says. “But between pitching the idea and executing it, the whole series blew up. There was a house style. What had drawn me to it had disappeared.”
The 2017 sleeper hit “Baby Driver,” about a socially awkward getaway driver, helped Wright get back on track. The Sony Pictures production grossed $227 million and proved that Wright could maintain his own style while working within studio constraints. But he stumbled with Last Night in Soho, an homage to Swinging London and Polanski-esque horror films that unfortunately ended up debuting in 2021 during the pandemic.
“It was disappointing because all the promotion for that movie was over Zoom,” Wright says. “The pandemic has never been a good time for anyone, and it hasn’t been good for movie theaters.”
Running Man marks Wright’s grand return to theaters as one of the most crowd-pleasing films in years. Still, even though King is his own brand and Powell’s star is on the rise, “The Running Man,” with its $110 million budget, is far from a sure thing. The film comes at a time when many R-rated action movies aimed at adults — even those starring big stars like Leonardo DiCaprio (“One Battle After Another”) and Robert Pattinson (“Mickey 17”) — are struggling at the box office. It goes without saying that this movie depicts a divided politics. Will audiences buy tickets to a movie set in a dystopia that reflects their world?
“It’s as close as you can get to ‘Running Man’ without actually killing people,” Wright said. “I don’t even want to predict when things will turn dark. I hope it doesn’t.”
Much of Hollywood is worried that AI will take their jobs. This is the central theme of “The Running Man,” which examines how technology can be used to manipulate public opinion. Just days before Wright was scheduled to appear at Comic-Con, the industry was abuzz with news that AI “actress” Tilly Norwood’s agent was seeking her as a client. Her creators envision her as the next Scarlett Johansson.
“Clearly, AI is here to stay,” Wright said. “You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube. But after seeing that Tilly Norwood piece, who would be excited about an actress who doesn’t exist?”
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Wright, who speaks while excitedly bouncing on his feet, is full of energy, even though he has not yet descended from the height of the “Running Man” panel and has just come down from London’s Red Eye. While in New York, he recalled hosting his first Comic-Con in 2004, when he and Pegg were promoting “Shaun of the Dead.” “We could walk around without anyone knowing who we were,” Wright said.
Wright just headlined a panel discussion attended by 3,000 fans. He’s clearly an icon to fellow movie geeks. The secret to Wright’s success is that deep down he’s still just a fan. That morning, Wright contacted Dr. King to ensure that, in the most “polite and British” way, he could tell his audience that King liked his take on The Running Man.
“Like? I love you!” King texted back. “It’s faithful enough to the original to satisfy the fans, but exciting enough for me.” And as Wright read the message, a smile appeared on his face.
“I’ll take it,” he says.
