Happy New Year, fellow Stephen King fans! The next 12 months is set to offer an impressive slate of treats for those who love the author’s work, as his latest novel, Never Flinch, is due out in a few months, and there could be as many as six different adaptations set to be released on the big screen and television. What also makes 2025 a special year for King, however, is the fact that it’s the setting of his dystopian 1982 novel The Running Man – and when we compare certain details in the story with the current state of the world, one can’t help but notice some horrifying prescience on display from the writer looking into the future.
Highlighting those special elements of the book is the main story of this week’s edition of The King Beat, and I’ll admit that it paints a pretty bleak picture – but I also promise that there is a follow-up headline that concludes the feature with a dash of sunshine. There is a lot to discuss, so let’s dig in!
Stephen King Got A Lot Of Things Right About 2025 In The Running Man… And I Really Wish He Didn’t
Like most of the books that Stephen King published under his pseudonym Richard Bachman, The Running Man features what could kindly be called a pessimistic vision. In the 2025 of the book, America is firmly in the control of a totalitarian regime with a state-run media/television network that is designed to produce both society-sedating propaganda and sadistic programming featuring unstimulated violence and death. Thankfully, the novel isn’t a perfect mirror of reality 25 years into the 21st century… but there are more things that have come true than anyone should be comfortable with.
Reality Television Is As Big As Ever
Reality television has existed for decades – including decades before the original publication of The Running Man – but that doesn’t negate two truths: the genre only got bigger and bigger in the years after King wrote the book, and it is as big as ever now in the year 2025. And while “reality television” is admittedly a broad net, there is unquestionably a particular affection among modern television audiences for reality competition programs.
Shows on television in 2025 don’t go as extreme as those that Stephen King invents for the book (more on that in a moment), but there is certainly a hunger among audiences to see strangers push and debase themselves in the hopes of winning a prize – as seen in shows like Survivor, The Amazing Race, American Ninja Warrior, Big Brother, and The Biggest Loser.
Television Has Totally Changed Content Standards
Things can get pretty wild on all of the shows I mentioned above, but there is one thing that is an important distinction between our world and the 2025 of The Running Man, which is the fact that we have not yet gotten to the point where people are actively being tortured and/or killed for the entertainment of a mass TV audience. It can’t be said with absolute certainty that we aren’t X years away from that actually happening, but we aren’t quite there yet. That being said, what does exist as a parallel between Stephen King’s novel and reality is that content standards have become way more lax.
It was in my lifetime as a millennial that the Federal Communications Commission would come down hard on instances of televised vulgarity, sexuality and/or excessive violence, but perspectives have greatly softened in the 21st century, and characters on the small screen today can pretty much behave like those in R-rated movies so long as the shows are in the right timeslots.
Air Quality Is Getting Progressively Worse
One of the key plot developments in The Running Man sees protagonist Ben Richards find protection during his time on the titular game show with a group of rebels in Boston and learn about a conspiratorial government plot concerning pollution and air filters. As it turns out, young Stephen King was very right to be concerned about the quality of the atmosphere in which we live, as recent findings from studies are scary.
American Lung Association’s State Of The Air analysis in 2024 found that a shocking number of people in the United States are living in areas “with failing grades for unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution.” According to the report, 131.2 million people, or 39 percent of the nation’s population, is existing in these conditions, and that number is up 11.7 million from 2023.
Lower Income And Non-White Communities Are Disproportionately Impacted By Climate Change
In The Running Man, the conspiracy isn’t simply about overall air quality – it’s about where the air quality is the worst. Ben Richards learns that there is an active effort by the government to keep poor people and minorities living in horrible environmental conditions in order to maintain class disparity. In our world, there are no known overt plots of this kind poisoning our society, but what remains true nonetheless is that impacts are disproportionate across American communities.
The American Lung Association’s findings show that 52 percent of people of color live in counties with at least one failing grade in standards testing despite only making up 41.6 percent of the country’s population, and in the counties with the worst air quality, minorities made up 63 percent of the population. Furthermore, the International Monetary Fund published a report in 2021 linking climate change and economic inequality on a global scale.
Technology-Generated Disinformation Is Everywhere
A key part of The Running Man as a show within Stephen King’s book is audience participation. Playing the game, Ben Richards is specifically working to outpace and hide from a collection of armed hitmen called Hunters, but he has to be wary of everybody that he meets because there are prizes awarded to citizens who provide information that lead to contestants’ capture and murder. In order to ensure that people are properly motivated to snitch, the Network fabricates and broadcasts material that suggests that runners are vicious criminals who deserve the fate of public execution.
In the year 2025 in our world, this kind of disinformation is ubiquitous and has become one of the scariest aspects of living in the digital age. Computer programs and artificial intelligence today have the ability to create images, video and audio that are wholly invented but appear to be genuine, and these materials are regularly used by scammers and con artists to obscure reality and challenge us to differentiate fiction from reality.
If you haven’t read Stephen King’s The Running Man before or it’s been a minute since you have, I can’t think of a better time than right now to pick up a copy of the book. Not only is there the fun of reading about a futuristic vision of 2025 in the year 2025, but it will properly get you prepared for director Edgar Wright’s upcoming film adaptation, which will be in theaters this November and has promised to be a much more faithful take on the source material than the 1987 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Stephen King’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Radio Station Got Saved At The Last Minute After December News Of Impending Shut Down
Comparing the world of today with the 2025 of The Running Man is rather depressing, but I promised to conclude this column with a pick-me-up story, and I plan to deliver: following news of its impending demise, as reported in early December 2024, Stephen King’s Maine-based rock ‘n’ roll radio station WKIT-FM was saved thanks to a last-minute sale that will keep the lights on and the music broadcasting.
Early last month, King himself announced that WKIT-FM and its two sister stations – WZON-AM Retro Radio and WZLO-FM – were going to be going off the air on New Year’s Eve, but the Associated Press reported the morning of the holiday that WKIT-FM will live on. The Maine station now belongs to local business men Greg Hawes and Jeff Solari, who have together formed the Rock Lobster Radio Group. There is a sentiment in the acquisition that suggests that Hawes and Solari will continue the legacy that the beloved author created, saying in a statement,
WKIT is the most legendary station in the region. It has tremendous history. We couldn’t let it die.
The AP report doesn’t include any details about what changes might be forthcoming at WKIT-FM as a result of the new ownership, but for now, this certainly seems like a great win for independent media and the station’s loyal listeners.
That wraps up this first 2025 edition of The King Beat, but with so many Stephen King-related goodies on the way in the coming 52 weeks, this column isn’t ending any time soon. You’ll be able to find my next feature here on CinemaBlend next Thursday – and you can spend the time between now and then discovering the history of King in film and television with my series Adapting Stephen King.