This Stephen King Movie Flop Just Spent 100 Straight Days Proving Doubters Wrong
When The Running Manopened in theaters last November, the reception was grim. Edgar Wright's adaptation of Stephen King's 1982 novel, originally published under King's pseudonym Richard Bachman, earned just $68.5 million worldwide against a $110 million budget. Critics were divided. Audiences were thin and Hollywood wrote it off as a failure.
Then it hit streaming.
The film debuted on Paramount+ on January 13 and dominated the charts for several weeks. Then it stayed. And stayed. And stayed some more. On April 23, it celebrated a notable milestone, 100 consecutive days on Paramount+'s U.S. streaming charts without ever once leaving them. As of that date, it sat in eighth place in the U.S. and second place on the platform's global charts.
That kind of sustained presence is genuinely rare. Most movies spike in their first week on a streaming service and fade quickly. The Running Man never faded.
Related: What Was Found in Stephen King's Private Archive Changes How You'll Read His Books Forever
The film flopped almost instantly in theaters, then headed to digital platforms in mid-December, where it finally got some attention. What audiences found when they settled in at home was a sharp, high-energy dystopian thriller that works considerably better at a relaxed pace than it did competing against Wicked and Zootopia 2 for multiplex dollars in a crowded holiday marketplace.
Glen Powell plays Ben Richards, a working-class man caught up in The Running Man, a deadly reality competition where contestants must survive 30 days while being hunted by professional assassins. Powell's performance earned near-universal praise even when the film itself divided critics. Audiences were more generous than critics, giving it a 77 percent approval rating.
The 1987 version, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, has long held cult status despite its own mixed reviews and loose adaptation of King's source material. Wright's version is more faithful to King's novel, with one notable exception. In King's original the ending is bleak, whereas in Wright's it is not.
The ensemble cast assembled around Powell includes William H. Macy, Lee Pace, Michael Cera, Colman Domingo, and Josh Brolin, a murderers' row of character actors who likely contributed to strong word-of-mouth once viewers actually found the thing.
The film's Paramount+ success has since translated to Prime Video as well, debuting in fifth place when it arrived on that platform in April. It's a genuinely unusual trajectory, theatrical bomb to multi-platform streaming hit in the span of five months.
King himself saw it coming. Before the film's theatrical release, he called it 'fantastic, DIE HARD for our time.' Audiences on Paramount+ seem to agree, even if the multiplex didn't.
https://t.co/wDID7MRClJ
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) October 13, 2025
New trailer: RUNNING MAN.
BTW: I've seen it and it's fantastic. DIE HARD for our time.
A bipartisan thrill ride.
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This story was originally published April 29, 2026 at 7:14 AM.