Warning: There are spoilers ahead for The Running Man (2025).The Running Man director Edgar Wright explains why the new movie changes Bradley Throckmorton (Daniel Ezra) from the original Stephen King novel. In both The Running Man book and in the new adaptation, Bradley is a rebel who helps Ben Richards (Glen Powell) stay alive.
The book’s Bradley is part of a gang. He and his fellow gang members have stolen library cards and done extensive reading, allowing them to learn hidden truths about their corrupt society. In the 2025 movie, Bradley is an anonymous social media personality called the Apostle, who breaks down The Running Man show and uses his platform to expose some of the truths behind the deadly competition.
While speaking with Inverse, Wright explains that this change was inspired by the real-life reality show X-Factor. Wright and writer Michael Bacall watched breakdown videos of reality television when writing The Running Man script. It was during one of the UK’s X-Factor that Wright learned about “the villain edit”, a term for when a reality series edits a contestant to make them look like the villain. Check out his comments below:
They’d obviously wound up this contestant backstage and given her the wrong information. Because they somehow knew that she had a temper and thought, “We’ve got to get her to flip out on stage.”
For Wright, this concept “really struck me as being very Ben Richards-y. The people are made to be national laughing stocks or made to be the villain and the tabloids all go after them.” This led to Wright and Bacall making Bradley a “superfan who’s also wise to all of the conspiracies.”
This change meant that they had to film scenes of the other contestants, Jenni Laughlin (Katy O’Brian) and Tim Jansky (Martin Herlihy), being killed in order for Bradley to fully explain the reality TV archetypes. Even though it added more to the shooting process, Wright is glad of the decision they made, expressing that it was “fun to all put together a lot of work.”
Making Bradley into the Apostle also plays an important role in The Running Man‘s ending, which differs significantly from the source material. The movie’s version of Bradley puts out a video debunking that Ben died when the plane exploded, which helps rally the public and unite them to finally rise up against the Network.
Ben is confirmed to be alive in the final scene, where he leads the crowd’s riot against Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) and the Network. The film uses Bradley’s video as a narrative tool to expedite the revolution and as part of an ending that is not as grim as the conclusion in the Stephen King book.
With The Running Man being published in 1982, Bradley becoming an anonymous social media personality is inevitably only one of many elements that has been changed. This specific change can be partly attributed to how access and the spread of information has evolved since the 1980s, along with making a more hopeful ending possible.
- Release Date
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November 14, 2025
- Producers
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George Linder, Nira Park, Simon Kinberg
