Edgar Wright’s 2025 Stephen King adaptation The Working Man has an ending designed to fulfill audiences anticipating payback, after watching down-on-his-luck protagonist Ben Richards (Glen Powell) endure for greater than two straight hours. Wright’s model follows within the footsteps of Paul Michael Glaser’s 1987 adaptation, which additionally offers the story an enormous, explosive ending. Each of these motion pictures fulfil expectations for a big-budget blockbuster motion film — they’re designed to ship the viewers out the door feeling righteously happy concerning the triumph of excellent over evil, the underdog over the fats cats, the dragon-slayer over the dragon.
However each these film endings miss the completely different, darker form of satisfaction that comes from the a lot grimmer ending of King’s novel, printed in 1982 beneath his Richard Bachman pseudonym. There’s a rote, business-as-expected high quality to the ending of each film variations. Glaser’s model, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger within the Ben Richards position, offers the character a extra neatly packaged happily-ever-after, whereas Wright’s model is extra chaotic and unsure. Nonetheless, they hit roughly the identical notes.
King’s guide lands in a different way. It’s darker, sadder, and extra highly effective, and it hits dwelling emotionally in a method neither film can handle. Within the course of, it leans into the story themes that each film variations squirm away from confronting. On the similar time, it’s apparent why no movie studio would preserve King’s ending on the film. Right here’s why.
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for the endings of all three versions of The Running Man.]
How does the 2025 film The Working Man finish?
In all three variations of The Working Man, protagonist Ben Richards is in such a determined scenario that he dangers his life on a deadly recreation present the place closely armed flunkies homicide contestants for sport, on behalf of cheering crowds pumped up by propaganda and lies concerning the opponents. Glaser’s adaptation radically adjustments the storyline, the primary character, and the central themes — we’ll handle that later. Wright’s model, alternatively, sticks carefully to King’s model for about three-fourths of its run time. It’s such a loyal adaptation in many of the story beats that the sudden veer into unique materials on the finish is much more putting and odd.
In King’s model and Wright’s adaptation, Richards resides in grinding poverty along with his spouse Sheila and their sick toddler, Cathy. He’s a blue-collar employee who can’t preserve a job, because of heavy underemployment, systemic poverty, dystopic oppression, and his personal incapacity to maintain his head down and ignore the abuse and victimization of his co-workers. When he tries to earn cash for Cathy’s medical remedy by the predatory recreation exhibits broadcast by Free-Vee — presumably the one TV channel left, and definitely probably the most highly effective one — a producer named Killian (Josh Brolin in Wright’s film) earmarks him for the TV present The Working Man, claiming that Richards’ simmering anger will make nice TV.
Richards is given stake cash and allowed a head begin to flee the Hunters, who will kill him in the event that they catch him. A lot of the physique of each variations follows him from metropolis to metropolis, as he hides in seedy inns and amongst sympathetic rebels combating again towards the disinformation society they dwell in, and its brutally dehumanizing bread-and-circuses distractions, like The Working Man. Richards thinks about Sheila and Cathy continually all through his episodic adventures, as he fights again towards the Hunters and witnesses how Killian docs his footage of Richards to make him look like a hateful felony sociopath, so The Working Man’s viewers can really feel righteous and highly effective over seeing him chased and killed.
Finally, because the Hunters shut in, Richards takes a hostage, Amelia Williams (Emilia Jones in Wright’s film), pretends he’s carrying explosives, and makes use of the specter of his bomb to commandeer a aircraft, with Amelia and lead Hunter McCone (Lee Tempo) on board. In each the guide and the film, Killian betrays McCone by providing Richards the lead Hunter job, saying Richards’ resourcefulness and dramatic instincts in surviving The Working Man have massively boosted scores, and earned him a fandom.
Right here’s the place the 2 variations sharply depart: Within the film, Richards says his household wouldn’t be secure if he grew to become a Hunter, however Killian tells him that McCone and his Hunters already murdered Sheila and Cathy, to avenge a Hunter that Richards killed earlier within the film. Killian even exhibits Richards footage of that supposed assault. This offers Richards the motive to take down McCone, although he nonetheless wavers on whether or not he believes Killian’s narrative, since he is aware of how simply Killian can fabricate plausible video.
However Richards refuses to change into a network-sponsored assassin, and tries to crash his aircraft into Free-Vee headquarters. Killian has the aircraft shot down, heedless of the town blocks the wreckage will destroy. Richards survives, apparently (as communicated in blurry footage on a viral videotape vlog) fleeing the wreckage in an escape pod. He someway finds Sheila (Jayme Lawson) and Cathy, who’re alive and dwelling in consolation and security: They presumably bought their community payout for Richard’s Working Man look as promised, and graduated to the higher class. (Apparently this model of the present and Killian aren’t as crooked and petty because the Glaser model, which kills off any contestants who survive the Hunters.)
Shortly after that, the Working Man viewers, radicalized by their fandom for Richards, erupts in violence towards Killian and the community. Molotov cocktails are thrown. (The Community apparently has incompetent or possibly simply bribeable safety for its live-audience tapings.) A riot breaks out. And Richards, who sneaked into the Community constructing (once more, horrible safety), kills Killian, along with his gunshot marking a dramatic minimize to credit.
That ending feels audience-safe and studio-approved: Richards refuses to simply accept Killian’s satan’s discount, which asks him to change into a part of the monstrous system that tortured and oppressed him, in trade for wealth, consolation, and (supposed) safety. As a substitute, he will get the whole lot he needs: His spouse and youngster are secure, wholesome, and joyful. The Working Man’s followers are revolting towards Free-Vee, and Killian will get his comeuppance. Nevertheless it all feels rushed, ragged, poorly justified, and onerous to consider, like a happily-ever-after fever dream Richards experiences simply earlier than Killian blows him out of the sky. Word: I’m not arguing that that’s true, the way in which I believe it was with the rewritten film ending of King’s novel The Lengthy Stroll. I simply don’t assume it feels almost as actual or as emotionally highly effective because the ending of the novel.
How does Stephen King’s novel finish?
Whereas Wright’s model follows King’s guide within the broad plot particulars up till that ending, it’s nonetheless a darker, deeper expertise all through. Working in print, King has much more room for world-building, and he lays out a clearer image of the dystopic particulars of this near-future world. Studying it at the moment is especially miserable due to the sense that nothing he was involved about 40 years in the past has gotten higher, and all of it has gotten worse over the previous 12 months particularly, from hovering wealth inequity to the ruling class’ use of rage-baiting propaganda and doctored info to the lively gutting of presidency oversight of companies dumping pollution into the air and water. Even the suppression of scientific analysis and monitoring of pollution that’s been taking place in 2025 is roofed in King’s guide.
King brazenly acknowledges in The Working Man that these are all systemic, everlasting issues relatively than recent new ones: When a insurgent says he sees a revolution coming, with “a nasty day for the maggots with their guts filled with roast beef,” Richards wearily responds, “Individuals have been seeing these issues for 2 thousand years.” Elsewhere, he seems round on the individuals dwelling in poverty and thinks about Jesus telling his disciples that there’ll at all times be poor individuals on the planet.
That sense of fatalistic realism, the acknowledgment that Richards isn’t going to repair a damaged system simply by killing the producer behind a recreation present, extends to the top of the guide. A serious distinction is that Killian nonetheless tells Richards that his spouse and youngster are useless, however that isn’t a lie, and there’s no pretense that McCone killed them: They had been each stabbed to loss of life of their slum house. Killian suggests the invaders had been prowlers and addicts, presumably searching for a rating, however Richards wonders in the event that they had been johns, as a result of he is aware of Sheila has been moonlighting as a intercourse employee to make ends meet. Regardless, they died almost two weeks in the past, whereas Richards was in hiding, risking his life for them.
The randomness of their deaths is each unhappy and plausible — an acknowledgment that rich individuals get pleasure from a stage of safety and security that individuals dwelling hand-to-mouth can solely dream of, and that “poverty violence” is only one extra menace dealing with individuals on the improper aspect of wealth inequity. It’s additionally a darkish irony that underlines what King has been doing with the guide all alongside, in continually underlining the callousness and cynicism of individuals like Killian, who prey on individuals like Richards and his household whereas monopolizing the sources that might save them.
Killian pretends he sympathizes with Richards and is sorry about his household, however Killian might have simply prevented their deaths by transferring them someplace secure when Richards signed onto the present. (His counterpart guarantees to do this within the film, although the reality of what occurs is fairly imprecise.) The truth that he doesn’t means that Killian knew the sport was rigged, that there was no likelihood Richards may win, or that Sheila may get the grand prize.
As within the film, Richards fights McCone on the aircraft, kills the Hunter, sees Amelia off with a parachute, and takes out the pilots. However in King’s model, McCone manages to gut-shoot Richards, who’s already within the technique of bleeding out from wounds he sustained earlier within the guide. Understanding he’s dying, Richards pilots the aircraft into the Free-Vee constructing. (He spends just a few pages improbably stumbling across the aircraft, stepping on his personal dangling intestines and getting them hung up on corpses first.) Killian seems out of his window simply in time to see the aircraft roaring towards him, and even someway makes eye contact with Richards. The guide ends on the road “The explosion was large, lighting up the night time just like the wrath of God, and it rained fireplace twenty blocks away.”
It’s simple to see why Hollywood studios would reject an ending like that, particularly in 2025. Even when Hollywood wasn’t largely allergic to this sort of tragic, Pyrrhic grim ending, it could be many generations earlier than a 9/11-traumatized society is able to take the imagery of a person slamming a aircraft right into a constructing as heroism relatively than horror.
However King’s ending doesn’t faux that Richards has mounted any downside with society, and even essentially ended the specter of Free-Vee or assured there received’t be one other season of The Working Man. It doesn’t supply a serious societal shift towards Ben Richards fandom, or towards any form of happily-ever-after for anybody. It simply acknowledges, in a blunt, brutal method, that there’s no well mannered or easy solution to battle again towards powermongers who reap the benefits of humanity’s worst, most egocentric, and most self-righteous impulses with a purpose to consolidate wealth and clout, and typically probably the most we are able to do is put our personal our bodies on the road towards them.
How does the 1987 Working Man finish?
Glaser’s model of the story, with Schwarzenegger within the lead position, adjustments almost the whole lot concerning the story besides the thought of a deadly recreation present, with Killian because the mastermind behind it. On this model, Richards is a army officer framed (once more, by way of doctored footage used as propaganda) for a civilian bloodbath he really tried to cease. Despatched to a army jail camp, he escapes, and when he’s recaptured, Killian (longtime game-show host Richard Dawson) recruits him for The Working Man.
On this model of the story, the sport takes place in a delegated kill-zone area in L.A., and appears one thing like a Road Fighter or Mortal Kombat recreation, with colourful costumes and personas for the Hunters, and smirky kill-lines for Schwarzenegger. (“What occurred to [that guy you just cut in half]?” “He needed to break up.”) Richards will get assist from a broadcast journalist, Amber (María Conchita Alonso), who helps him expose that the Working Man recreation is rigged, and broadcasts the unedited tape that proves he was framed for the bloodbath. Richards joins the resistance, they pressure their method into the TV station, and Richards straps Killian into one of many rocket sleds that ship contestants by underground tunnels into the sport area. When Killian arrives within the zone, he hits a wall and dramatically explodes.
This model of the story ditches many of the ideas that King was exploring. Your complete concept of Richards being prepared to threat his life for his household is gone: Schwarzenegger is kind of a lone-wolf powerful man with not one of the unique character’s soulful humanity. Glaser hints on the concept of systematic oppression and poverty all through the movie — the bloodbath Schwarzenegger is framed for was an try and suppress the populace throughout a “meals riot” — nevertheless it isn’t a serious focus, and eradicating the sport to a delegated space means Richards spends so much much less time in any recognizable or relatable setting.
Which is why it feels so odd that Wright’s model of the film, which does zoom in on King’s character and story particulars, and explores a lot of what he was making an attempt to do, nonetheless winds up with an ending that’s straight out of the shiny Eighties model of the film. It looks like a betrayal of King’s guide in a method the Schwarzenegger movie doesn’t, as a result of it respects King’s intentions, then tosses a simplistic ending onto a sophisticated setting. We’re by no means prone to see King’s guide tailored fairly as he wrote it, however Wright’s film looks like an odd compromise that walks proper as much as the sting of the form of gutsiness that made King a family identify, then — true to the guide and film’s title — runs away on the final minute.
