This article contains mild spoilers for “The Running Man.”
Throughout his career, director Edgar Wright has taken it upon himself to load up his films with gags of every sort. Be they jokes, stunts, physical comedy or sight gags, a Wright film has an abundance of them. Though they’re not typically thought of as gags per se, Easter eggs and references also fall under this category, and as such, every film Wright has made so far is practically overflowing with them. Being the knowledgeable and responsible filmmaker he is, Wright typically themes these Easter eggs to each film. Hence, “Shaun of the Dead” is rife with references to zombie movies and media, “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” has a lot of video game Easter eggs hidden everywhere, and so on.
This month’s “The Running Man” isn’t just Wright’s latest film, but it’s the fourth feature film released in 2025 that’s adapted from a novel by Stephen King. (It’s also the second film of ’25 to be adapted from a novel King wrote under his old pen name of Richard Bachman and the second movie adapted from his “The Running Man” novel, the first being made in 1987 with director Paul Michael Glaser and star Arnold Schwarzenegger.) So it should come as no surprise that Wright made sure to include a bunch of references to other Stephen King movies in the film, some of which have some intriguing implications.
However, pound for pound, the highest number of King references occurs in a single scene in the film. When Ben Richards (Glen Powell) and his fellow Running Man game show contestants head to the locker room to obtain their uniforms, the names on the other lockers are all references to other actors in Stephen King movies. Pretty sneaky, sir!
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The names in The Network’s locker room are all leading actors from previous King movies
In Wright’s “The Running Man,” the hub of the film’s dystopian future society is The Network, which is part government agency, part entertainment conglomerate. Once he’s been fired from yet another demeaning wage job, Richards decides that the only option left to help his sick child is to audition for one of The Network’s various honey trap game shows.
After promising his wife Sheila (Jayme Lawson) that he won’t audition for The Running Man given how no contestant from that show ever makes it through alive, he finds himself poached and manipulated into joining that very series. The revelation occurs when he and several other prospective contestants walk into the main game show locker room in order to retrieve the uniforms which are all labeled and color-coded for their show.
This locker room bears the names of multiple actors who famously starred in movies based on the works of Stephen King, and it’s a neat little Easter egg collection. We see “Nicholson” (as in Jack Nicholson from “The Shining”), “Spacek” (Sissy Spacek from “Carrie”) and “Walken” (Christopher Walken from “The Dead Zone”) featured most prominently. I’m sure that once the film is on home video we’ll be able to freeze frame and pick out more names around the room, too.
In addition to a big Easter egg hunt occurring in a single room, this reference continues a thematic thread throughout Wright’s movie, which is blurring the line between reality and fiction. To wit: Ben Richards is taking his place in The Running Man, while Glen Powell is simultaneously taking his own place in “The Running Man.” It’s a “star is born” moment both within and without the world of the movie, and the actor’s names in the room underline that.
But wait, there’s more!
Does The Running Man take place in the same universe as the It films and shows?
The locker room is far from the only Easter egg in “The Running Man.” For instance, we’ve known since the film’s trailer that Schwarzenegger can be seen on the film’s fictional currency, New Dollars. In the same vein as the locker room Easter egg(s), however, is the fact that one section of the movie takes place in Derry, Maine.
Derry is the famous fictional town where the novel “It” is set, along with its film adaptations and the new series “It: Welcome to Derry.” In “The Running Man,” Derry is where Richards hides out with Elton Parrakis (Michael Cera), an off-the-grid revolutionary whose long-standing beef with the Network and the government makes him sympathetic to Richards’ plight. Elton lives in a creepy looking dilapidated Gothic-esque home with his elderly mother, and has secretly booby trapped his entire house in order to bring the pain to any authority figure intruders, Kevin McCallister-style.
The fact that Wright, cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung, and production designer Marcus Rowland make the Derry scenes look eerie and Gothic seems to indicate that the setting isn’t a mere Easter egg reference to “It,” but that this might be intended to be the very same Derry. King famously uses his shared universe references to not just connect but to deepen his fiction, giving his stories that much more resonance knowing they’re all part of the same world. Wright could be doing a similar thing here, subtly commenting on how the oppressive, fascistic government of “The Running Man” is so bad that even the citizens of a town plagued by an interstellar child-eating demon are more concerned with the Network than with Pennywise. It makes the film’s political commentary that much stronger, and it’s all thanks to an Easter egg.
“The Running Man” is in theaters now.
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Read the original article on SlashFilm.
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