Stephen King’s The Running Man imagines a dystopian future where human misery is packaged as entertainment, where the government snuffs out personal freedoms and the rich reap untold profits while working people are enticed to attack themselves rather than the power structures that keep them oppressed. None of this was a stretch when King, writing under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, published the book in 1982, with Ronald Reagan in the White House and unemployment at its highest point since the Great Depression. But reality seems to have caught up to King’s story, and not just because he set his tale in the unimaginably distant future of 2025.

Edgar Wright’s new movie hews much closer to King’s book than the 1987 version, which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as a good-guy cop who gets s

See Full Page