The King’s Ending

The new film version of The Running Man makes a significant, somewhat frustrating change to the plot.

[Note: the following contains spoilers for the book and both film adaptations of The Running Man]

If you’re familiar with Stephen King’s prose, you’re probably also aware of the running joke among critics and fans that his endings are not that great, a gag that took on a meta layer in the film It Chapter Two, where King himself cameos as a shopkeeper who expresses similar opinions about the writings of Bill Denbrough, one of the protagonists. Personally, I think the assessment is a bit too harsh, although it is true that, given his writing method (he does not have the entire plot in mind when he starts putting words on the page), the conclusion is sometimes not the most memorable part of his novels (that he wrote a few of them under the influence of alcohol and/or cocaine up until the late 1980s probably didn’t help either).

It is not surprising, then, that Hollywood adaptations of his work have sometimes altered the endings significantly, starting with the very first movie based on one of his books, Carrie (Brian De Palma rightfully upped the ante in the final stretch to match the overall intensity of the rest of the film). In fact, of the four (!) King-inspired pictures that opened in cinemas this year, only one – Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck – contained no major changes. The last of those four films, in release order, is Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, arguably the most frustrating of the bunch from an adaptation standpoint.

First published in 1982, The Running Man is one of five novels from that period that King published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman (this was done at the behest of the publishers, who thought putting out more than one book a year would tarnish the author’s brand). All five share one key characteristic: even by King standards, they’re proper downers. One of them, Rage, is famously “now out of print, and a good thing”, as the man himself puts it in the introduction of the Bachman Books collection, after it was found in the locker of a high school student who had shot eight of his peers at a prayer meeting.