The biggest box office battle of the year is on the horizon (more on that below) — and it can’t happen soon enough, with moviegoing continuing to struggle. Last weekend’s exhibit A: The Running Man, which tripped up during its opening frame despite tons of promotion from its star, Glen Powell. Paramount’s latest landed in second place with just $17 million (behind Lionsgate’s third installment in the Now You See Me franchise).
“I just don’t think there was a real compelling reason you’d have to go see this kind of thing,” Sean McNulty says of the miss, noting the Edgar Wright adaptation of the Stephen King novel (written under King’s pseudonym, Richard Bachman) eschewed the goofy action beats and one-liners of the 1987 version of the story starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“This movie has really nothing to do with that,” Sean says of the original. “So for the original’s fan base, it wasn’t a terribly exciting sell. And then you have a generation who’s over 25 and has never even heard of the first one.”
The Running Man is just the latest ’80s reboot to flop at the box office, following such misses as 2012’s Total Recall, 2014’s RoboCop and 2024’s The Fall Guy. (“The amount of carnage on the ’80s remake pile is very, very large,” Sean notes.) However, the hope was that Powell — one of the industry’s ascendant stars on the strength of his breakout work in Top Gun: Maverick, and a showman quality that he has learned from Tom Cruise — could help The Running Man break from the trend. That didn’t happen, Richard Rushfield thinks, because Powell was out of place in the dystopian thriller.
“Maybe the circuits didn’t connect,” Richard says, adding how Powell’s all-American qualities feel more at home in the 1950s than in a near-future society in ruin. “What is Glen Powell doing in the future?”
Elsewhere on today’s Monday Morning Quarterbacks: Kudos to Lionsgate for getting a win with Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, assessing the specialty results for Sony Pictures Classics’ Nuremberg and Focus Features’ Bugonia and handicapping the year-end box office fight between Wicked: For Good and Avatar: Fire & Ash for holiday season supremacy (plus Richard and Sean’s favorite sleeper).
