How Edgar Wright updated a 43-year-old Stephen King thriller for our dystopian reality

That idea became The Running Man, which King published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1982. (Fun fact: one of the reasons fans figured out King was the author was because he set part of the story in Derry, Maine, where It and other King stories take place.) The original novel has a distinctly science fiction tone: At the time of publication, its 2025 setting was more than 40 years in the future. For the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie released just five years later, director Paul Michael Glaser followed suit, setting the story around 2017, in a version of the future featuring rocket-sleds and then-unprecedented video deepfakes. But when Shaun of the Dead writer-director Edgar Wright decided to re-adapt King’s book, he knew he needed to take a different approach. After all, the far-off future of 2025 has arrived.