Event

The Running Man

"Everyday this year, I turn around there's another example of how stuff in the movie is coming true," Steven de Souza, who wrote the screenplay for The Running Man, told Motherboard in a phone interview. "I just want to say, it's not my fault."

Set in Los Angeles circa 2019, The Running Man is based off of a 1982 novel of the same name written by Stephen King under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. It tells the story of America in the aftermath of an economic collapse that happened in 2017.

In this post-apocalyptic future, a huge class divide is maintained by military rulethe elite live in fancy, militarized high rises in Los Angeles while the poor are relegated to massive slums on the outskirts of the city, where they are slaughtered indiscriminately by the military. It's tough not to see some parallels here to the real-life economic disparities, gentrification, and near-record high income gap in the United States today." Daniel Oberhaus, Motherboard - "The Running Man Is the Perfect Dystopian Movie For Trumps Inauguration"

"The Running Man explores, in its campy way, how easily propaganda can be empowered, and how effectively a world that blends information and entertainment can destabilize the very notion of facts themselves. The truth hasnt been very popular lately, one political prisoner tells another, at the outset of The Running Mans action, and the rest of the movie goes about proving that." - Megan Garber, The Atlantic

"Where The Running Man truly endures, however, is in its caricature of American television culture: the heady combination of glamour, fame, money and cruelty that still resonates to this day." Frank Swain, BBC