What happens at the end of The Running Man is not the ending King wrote
Edgar Wright's The Running Man arrived in UK cinemas on 12 November 2025, sold as the faithful adaptation of Stephen King's 1982 novel — the one the 1987 Schwarzenegger film never was. And it mostly is faithful. Right up until the last ten minutes, where Wright and King part company completely.
How the 2025 film ends
Ben Richards (Glen Powell) lives. Aboard the Network's jet, Killian (Josh Brolin) offers him a job as the newest hunter, using faked footage of his murdered wife and daughter as bait. Richards kills the hunters instead — including their leader McCone (Lee Pace), unmasked as a former runner who took the very deal Richards refuses. Amelia parachutes out carrying revolutionary pamphlets, a missile blows the plane apart, and Richards survives thanks to the auto-eject system. Then the truth gets loose: the recovered black box exposes Killian's lies, a rebellion erupts under the slogan "Richards Lives", Ben reunites with his family — whose deaths Killian had faked — and in the final scene he steps out of a rioting studio crowd and shoots Killian.
Wright never intended anything else. Speaking to The National in 2025, he said:
"We were never going to do the ending in the book"
— adding that something so bleak didn't feel right for today, and that King himself was happy with the change.
The ending King actually wrote
King published the novel in 1982 under his Richard Bachman pen name, and closed it with a kamikaze run. Mortally wounded after the fight with McCone, Richards sends his hostage off the plane with a parachute, takes the controls, and flies the jet straight into the Games Network tower — killing himself and Killian together. Written nearly two decades before 9/11, that image reads very differently now. Which is exactly why Wright wouldn't film it.
Three endings, one story
- The 1982 novel — Richards dies crashing the plane into the tower; Killian dies with him. No survivors, no hope.
- The 1987 film — barely the same story. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Richards fights through a game-show kill zone, sends host Damon Killian (Richard Dawson) into a billboard on a rocket sled, and walks off to a cheering crowd.
- The 2025 film — Richards fakes his death, sparks a revolution, and personally executes Killian on live television.
For the record: King set his novel in the dystopian future of 2025 — the very year Wright's film landed. And Schwarzenegger appears in it anyway, as the face on the $100 bill.