The Running Man: Josh Brolin to play the villain in Edgar Wright’s reimagining

Josh Brolin (Outer Range) may not be charging up his power ring anytime soon, but he is in final negotiations to play the villain in Edgar Wright’s upcoming reimagining of The Running Man.

Glen Powell (Twisters) stars in The Running Man as a “desperate man, needing money for his sick daughter, who joins the most popular show, The Running Man, in which teams of killers hunt down contestants. The longer that a contestant survives, the more money that person makes. But as the game show’s producers and killers will find out, this desperate man will break all the rules and expose the show’s dark secrets.” Katy O’Brian (Love Lies Bleeding) and Daniel Ezra (All American) have also joined the cast. Detail on who Brolin will be playing are being kept under wraps, but Deadline states he will “play the antagonist who is behind the violent reality show.“

Edgar Wright is directing The Running Man from a script he co-wrote with Michael Bacall. It’s based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name, which was published in 1982 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Wright has previously said that The Running Man remake will be closer to the original Stephen King novel than the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. “I like the film but I like the book more, and they didn’t really adapt the book,” Wright said. “Even as a teenager when I saw the Schwarzenegger film I was like, ‘Oh, this isn’t like the book at all!’ And I think, ‘Nobody’s [done] that book.’ So when that came up, I was thinking, and Simon Kinberg says, ‘Do you have any interest in The Running Man?’ I said, ‘You know what? I’ve often thought that that book is something crying out to be adapted.’ Now, that doesn’t mean that it’s easy!“

Josh Brolin can currently be seen starring alongside Peter Dinklage in Brothers. The action comedy “tells the story of a reformed criminal (Brolin) whose attempt at going straight is derailed when he reunites with his sanity-testing twin brother (Dinklage) on a cross-country road trip for the score of a lifetime. Dodging bullets, the law, and an overbearing mother along the way, they must heal their severed family bond before they end up killing each other.” The film is now streaming on Prime Video. Brolin is also set to appear in Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, which will be released on Netflix next year.