This article contains mild spoilers for “The Running Man.”
Throughout his career, director Edgar Wright has taken it upon himself to load his films with gags of all kinds. Whether it’s jokes, stunts, physical comedy or visual gags, a Wright film is full of them. While not generally considered gags per se, Easter eggs and references also fall into this category, and as such, every film Wright has made to date is practically overflowing with them. As a competent and responsible filmmaker, Wright usually has these Easter eggs as his theme in every film. As a result, “Shaun of the Dead” is full of references to zombie movies and media, “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” has plenty of video game Easter eggs hidden throughout, and so on.
This month’s “The Running Man” is not only Wright’s latest film, but it’s the fourth feature film released in 2025 adapted from a Stephen King novel. (It’s also the second film of 25 adapted from a novel King wrote under his former pseudonym Richard Bachman and the second film adapted from his novel “The Running Man,” the first being made in 1987 with director Paul Michael Glaser and star Arnold Schwarzenegger.) So it’s no surprise that Wright made sure to include a bunch of references to other Stephen King films in the film, some of which have intriguing implications.
However, pound for pound, the most references to King occur in a single scene in the film. When Ben Richards (Glen Powell) and his fellow contestants on the game show Running Man head to the locker room to collect their uniforms, the names on the other lockers are all references to other actors from Stephen King’s films. Rather sneaky, sir!
The names in The Network’s locker room are all main cast members from previous King films.
In Wright’s “The Running Man,” the center of the film’s dystopian future society is The Network, which is both a government agency and an entertainment conglomerate. Once he is fired from another humiliating salaried job, Richards decides that the only option left for him 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 wouldn’t audition for The Running Man since no contestant on that show makes it out alive, he finds himself poached and manipulated into joining that same show. The reveal occurs when he and several other potential contestants enter the game show’s main locker room in order to collect the uniforms which are all labeled and color-coded for their show.
This dressing room is named after several actors who have starred in films based on the works of Stephen King, and it’s a neat little collection of Easter eggs. We see “Nicholson” (as in Jack Nicholson from “The Shining”), “Spacek” (Sissy Spacek from “Carrie”) and “Walken” (Christopher Walken from “The Dead Zone”) featured. I’m sure once the film is released on home video, we’ll also be able to freeze the frame and pick out more names from the room.
Along with a big Easter egg hunt taking place in a single room, this reference continues a thematic thread throughout Wright’s film that blurs the line between fact and fiction. Namely: Ben Richards takes his place in The Running Man, while Glen Powell simultaneously takes his own place in “The Running Man”. It’s a “star birth” moment, both inside and outside the world of film, and the names of the actors in the room underline it.
But wait, there’s more!
Does The Running Man take place in the same universe as the It films and series?
The locker room is far from the only Easter egg in “The Running Man.” For example, we know from 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 eggs, however, is the fact that a section of the film takes place in Derry, Maine.
Derry is the famous fictional town where the novel “It”, as well as its film adaptations and the new series “It: Welcome to Derry”, is set. In “The Running Man”, Derry is where Richards hides with Elton Parrakis (Michael Cera), an off-the-grid revolutionary whose long-standing conflict with the Network and the government makes him sympathetic to Richards’ plight. Elton lives in a creepy, dilapidated gothic house with his elderly mother, and has secretly booby-trapped his entire house in order to make any authority figure intruder suffer, Kevin McCallister-style.
The fact that Wright, cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung, and production designer Marcus Rowland give the Derry scenes an eerie, gothic look seems to indicate that the setting is not a simple reference to “It,” but that it could be the same Derry. King uses his shared universe references not only to connect, but to deepen his fiction, giving his stories even more resonance knowing that they are all part of the same world. Wright could do 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 a child-eating interstellar demon are more concerned about the Network than Pennywise. This makes the film’s political commentary even stronger, and it’s all thanks to an Easter egg.
“The Running Man” is currently in theaters.
