Why The Running Man (2025) flopped: Glen Powell points at what Paramount did a month before release
In 2024, Glen Powell was the actor every studio wanted to be in business with. A year later he had a $110 million Stephen King movie in theaters, and he thinks he knows exactly when it started to go wrong.
Edgar Wright's The Running Man opened on November 14, 2025, with Powell as Ben Richards, Josh Brolin as the producer of a deadly game show and Colman Domingo as its host. It made $16.5 million in its first weekend in North America, finishing second behind Now You See Me: Now You Don't.
It ended its run with about $68.6 million worldwide on a reported $110 million production budget, per The Numbers. That budget was the biggest of Wright's career.
Almost a year later, in his October 2026 Esquire cover story, Powell gave his explanation, as Variety reported. Paramount, he said, laid off its marketing team a month before the film opened, in the middle of a merger.
"They let go of an entire marketing department."
— Glen Powell, to Esquire
What was happening at Paramount
Powell's timing checks out. The fall of 2025 was the most chaotic stretch Paramount had been through in years:
- August 7: Skydance closed its merger with Paramount, with David Ellison in charge.
- September 16: Marc Weinstock, the marketing chief behind the Top Gun: Maverick campaign, exited the studio. Domestic distribution president Chris Aronson was also on his way out.
- Mid-October: Josh Goldstine, Warner Bros.' former marketing chief, officially took over marketing and distribution, with The Running Man among his first releases.
- October 29: Paramount Skydance began cutting about 1,000 U.S. jobs, part of a plan to take $2 billion out of costs. Ellison's memo to staff talked about "addressing redundancies."
That last round hit 16 days before The Running Man opened. Reports from the time don't say how much of the film marketing team was cut, so "entire department" is Powell's version. The rest of the timeline is on the record.
The man who sold Top Gun: Maverick left Paramount two months before The Running Man opened. His replacement had about four weeks to get it out the door.
What else was working against it
Marketing chaos wasn't the only problem. The opening weekend looked rough on several fronts:
- The competition: Now You See Me: Now You Don't opened the same weekend to $21.3 million, Predator: Badlands was in its second weekend, and Wicked: For Good arrived seven days later.
- The audience: Women made up only 37% of the opening-weekend crowd, compared with 54% for Now You See Me.
- The reception: Audiences gave it a B+ CinemaScore, and reviews were good but not great, around 64% on Rotten Tomatoes.
It had also missed the trackers. Projections had it in the mid-$20 millions before the weekend, and it came in at $16.5 million.
Does Powell have a point?
Partly. A $110 million sci-fi movie with no franchise behind it needs a loud campaign, and Paramount was swapping out its marketing leadership and cutting staff right when that campaign mattered most. That's a real handicap, and Powell is right to name it.
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But the movie was also squeezed between a magic-heist threequel, a Predator sequel and Wicked, and it barely reached women at all. Powell has a fair complaint about the timing. He also had a $110 million Stephen King adaptation that opened against Jesse Eisenberg's card tricks and lost.
Previously we wrote: Why was Wicked split into two movies? One song made a single film impossible