Lee Pace, who memorably played the villain Ronan in Marvel Studios’ Guardians of the Galaxy, is back in bad guy mode.
The actor has closed a deal to join Glen Powell, Josh Brolin and Katy O’Brian (Love Lies Bleeding) in The Running Man, Paramount’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel.
Edgar Wright is directing the feature and co-wrote the script with Michael Bacall. Production is due to shoot in London at the top of next year.
King’s Running Man, published in 1982 and written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, was set in 2025 in an America under a totalitarian regime that uses violent game shows to placate the disenfranchised masses.
The novel centered on one desperate man, needing money for his sick daughter, who joins the most popular show, The Running Man, in which teams of killers hunt down contestants. The longer a contestant survives, the more money that person makes. But as the game show’s producers and killers will find out, this desperate man will break all the rules and expose the show’s dark secrets.
Powell is playing that desperate man. Brolin stars as the ruthless producer of the game show, while O’Brian will play one of the contestants on the show.
Pace is essentially the heavy of the movie, playing the brutal chief hunter for the network airing the game shows and tasked by the producer with tracking down Powell’s character.
Paramount is releasing the film on Nov. 21, 2025. Simon Kinberg, Nira Park and Wright are producing.
Pace portrayed the colorful Marvel villain Ronan the Accuser in 2014’s Guardians and reprised the role for 2019’s billion dollar-grossing Captain Marvel. The actor starred in AMC’s mid-2010s drama Halt and Catch Fire and more recently was one of the stars of Apple TV’s ambitious sci-fi series Foundation, which will be entering its third season.
He is repped by WME and Peikoff Mahan Law.
