Long before Edgar Wright’s The Running Man hits theaters this week , the director of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz had been thinking about making it. He read the original 1982 novel by Stephen King (under his pseudonym Richard Bachman) as a boy and excitedly went to theaters in 1987 to see the film version, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger . Wright enjoyed the adaptation but was a little let down by just how different it was from the novel.

Years later, after he’d become a successful filmmaker, he looked into acquiring the rights to remake it, but they were unavailable. A few years after that, when asked on Twitter about a movie he’d love to remake, he answered “ The Running Man .” Later still, producer Simon Kinberg, who’d recently gotten hold of the rights, remembered that

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