2025 was a major year for Stephen King films. Four of his stories hit cinemas: The Monkey, The Life of Chuck, The Long Walk and The Running Man. And two more graced the small screen – The Institute and the Pennywise origin series It: Welcome to Derry.
Indeed, there was a moment in British cinemas earlier in the year, where you could watch The Life of Chuck and have the film preceded by trailers for the other three cinematic adaptations, making King’s work feel ubiquitous right now.
Both The Long Walk and The Running Man were originally written by King under his pseudonym Richard Bachman – a name he used to try out dark stories that leaned more towards speculative fiction.
In his 1982 novella The Running Man, Ben Richards (played by Glen Powell in the new film) takes part in a reality show that will earn him $1 billion, provided he survives 30 days. No one ever has, but Richards’ daughter is gravely ill and his wife has turned to sex work to earn money to try to pay for her treatment.
Apt for its current adaptation, the novella takes place in an alternate 2025 and speaks of a future we recognise from other dystopias.
A previous adaptation was released in 1987, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. But as critics noted at the time, fidelity to the source material ended with the title. The ’80s version was a glitzy action romp complete with gold spandex, but the book is far darker. In our current era of reality television and grasping fame, it has new things to say.
The new adaptation arrived against a backdrop of similar stories, such as the massively popular Netflix drama Squid Game (2021-2025) and the Hunger Games franchise (2012-present). There have also been similar reality-TV shows such as Squid Game: The Challenge (2023-2025), Take the Money and Run (2011), and Hunted (2015-present).
The Running Man ties into a popular survival sub-genre, that can be traced back to films such as The Most Dangerous Game (1936). Literary theorist Terry Thompson describes these films as having not only a Darwinian “survival of the fittest” quality, but also “an exotic setting, stereotypical characters, melodramatic acting, and a preposterous plotline”.
The Bachman books
There are seven books by King’s alter-ego, Richard Bachman. King reportedly came up with the pseudonym because the publishing industry at the time had an unspoken rule about releasing one book per year. He also had a desire to test his fame, and see whether books under a different name would sell as well.
In general, the Bachman books are bleaker than King’s other works.
Rage, first published in 1977, concerns a violent and disaffected young man who commits a school shooting in response to his expulsion. Following a rash of similar shootings and, more importantly, copies of Rage being found among a perpetrators’ belongings, King asked his publisher to withdraw it from print.
The third Bachman Book is The Long Walk. It was published in 1978, and adapted into a film last year by Francis Lawrence, who has directed all of the Hunger Games sequels and prequels. Published in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War, the novella follows an annual event where young men compete in a harrowing contest – a walk that lasts until only one remains. Anyone who stops walking is killed.
It’s dystopian, violent, televised pseudo-entertainment, which contestants see as the only way to guarantee a decent quality of life. This feels like a heavy handed metaphor for the late 1970s, when readers were exposed to the nightly televised horrors of the war in Vietnam.
Moreover, it speaks to the current political moment, where exploiting oneself for entertainment purposes is seen as a viable (if not desirable) career choice and while huge numbers of people are barely subsisting. King was likely influenced by the 1969 adaptation of Horace McCoy’s novel They Shoot Horses Don’t They?, about a lethal dancing competition to be won by the last woman standing.
The publication of The Running Man and The Long Walk were contemporaneous with the birth of predatory Capitalism, in which company profits are maximised by any means permissible within a society’s ethical norms, leading to Reaganomics in the 1980s.
This, combined with post-Vietnam atrocities taking place in the US itself, created the environment for King’s books. He combines satire and science fiction to criticise capitalism – showing TV shows where people compete for money even at the cost of humiliation or violence, and societies where people will kill innocents simply because they are told to.
In the present day, with troops in the US occupying cities due to Trumped-up myths about civil disobedience, and game shows inspired by dystopian fiction where contestants are allegedly getting “hypothermia and nerve damage”, these scenarios seem very relevant again.
There have been 57 adaptations of King’s work over the past 40 years, so he’s obviously a reasonable guarantee of healthy profits. And, It: Welcome to Derry even seems to suggest the birth of a King Cinematic Universe, with a character from The Shining also appearing in the series.
While The Running Man and The Long Walk are game-show dystopias, 2025’s other two King films mixed cursed prophecy (predictions of inevitable character deaths to come) and visions of the apocalypse.
Squint, and you could make a connection with the terrors facing humanity in general, such as climate change and the resurrection of potential nuclear conflict. However, The Monkey treats the apocalypse as black comedy and The Life of Chuck’s world-ending vision (spoiler alert) turns out to be the sleeping fantasy of a dying man, in a film otherwise about the goodness and charm of mankind.
So, in a year that was the second most populous for King’s works on screen (only exceeded in 2017), there was still something notable about his work.
These adaptations hold a mirror up to society’s problems and treat them with horror and disdain. And since a number of these films show resistance to malevolent forces, perhaps they still offer hope for the future.
Harriet Earle is a senior lecturer in English and Creative Writing, Sheffield Hallam University, and Alex Fitch is a lecturer and PhD candidate in Comics and Architecture, University of Brighton.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
