Adventures in Streaming: Is bad Stephen King still good?

Glen Powell starred in the second adaptation of Stephen King’s short story The Running Man. It was technically a remake of a cheesy 1987 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Photo by Paramount Pictures

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With more than 100 movies and miniseries adaptations inspired by his work, Stephen King is responsible for enough cinematic source material to rival the Bible.

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This is not to say King projects are successful. But even some King films that bombed have endured more than some of the hits, the most obvious one being The Shawshank Redemption (on Crave), the prison drama which failed upon its release in 1994, but gained a passionate following on cable.

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In the streaming realm, that dynamic may be at work again with Edgar Wright’s adaptation of The Running Man, which failed to make back its budget in theatres when it released in cinemas last year but has since emerged as a favourite watch on Crave.

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The dystopian thriller is technically a remake of a cheesy 1987 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (streaming on Paramount+). Befitting the director of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Wright’s take on the material is more boisterously cinematic, and more hard-hitting in the satire of its premise: a tyrannical government employs a killer game show as one strategy to bread-and-circus the general population into complacency. (In an era where UFC fights are staged on the White House lawn to celebrate the president’s birthday, let’s just say it rings true.)

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Glen Powell plays Ben Richards, a well-intentioned man who is desperate to save his chronically ill daughter. His anger and his penchant for defying authority catches the interest of TV exec Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) who succeeds in casting Ben despite the fact the show kills most of its contestants.

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The film has its issues, including an unsatisfying denouement (in which a masked character explains it all to you) and the fact that Powell isn’t really a sympathetic presence.

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It is one of cinema’s great conundrums that, despite being a hopelessly wooden actor, Schwarzenegger still somehow managed to get you onside.

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But Wright knows how to stage an action set piece, and he fashions some doozies, all in the service of a satire that convincingly demonstrates the system is rigged against us.

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If that is not downer enough for you, get a load of The Long Walk (2025, also on Crave). Like The Running Man, this movie was taken from a novel by Richard Bachman, King’s off-brand nom de plume.

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King began writing the book in the 1960s. Reflecting the don’t-trust-anyone-over-30 ethos of the period, it depicts a competition in an alternate dystopian America in which 50 young men are plucked from all over the country to compete in a gruelling death march: if any competitor fails to keep to the three-miles-per-hour pace, he gets his “ticket” in the form of a bullet to the head, as promised by the film’s heavy “The Major” (Mark Hamill).