The Running Man has an unexpected connection to Pennywise
If you’re watching The Running Man, don’t expect to outpace the Stephen King universe of it all.
There’s a small connection between Edgar Wright’s 2025 adaptation of the horror master’s 1982 novel, and King’s extended realm of stories — and it has to do with IT‘s dreaded sewer-dwelling Pennywise the Clown.
In The Running Man, desperate man Ben Richards (Glen Powell) is chased all over the Eastern states of America by hunters for televised entertainment. From New York to Boston to Maine, Richards is pursued, and it’s in this latter location he ends up in a familiar fictional town: Derry.
After encountering locals watching The Running Man on an outdoor screen together, Richards meets Elton Parrakis (Michael Cera), a covert rebel and anarchist ready to take down the all-powerful Network with The Truth, his homemade zine filled with exposés. We hear Elton’s mother, unaware of her son’s guest, worrying about Richards being somewhere on the run nearby, as she asks, “What if he’s in Derry?”
Credit: Paramount Pictures
Derry is, of course, Stephen King’s go-to fictional Maine town, based on the town of Bangor. Notably, Derry is also Pennywise’s base of terror in IT. As Mashable’s Sam Haysom explains, “[Bangor] is the town where the horror master was living when he wrote his novel — a note at the end of IT says King started writing the book in Bangor in 1981 and finished a little over four years later. The author has also confirmed in interviews that Derry is essentially a fictionalised version of the Maine town.”
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In King’s The Running Man novel, Richard indeed makes it to Derry, though the events are slightly different. Another fun element in the film is that Elton and his mom live in a Victorian Gothic mansion with vertical architecture and a turret, like many Stephen King characters do (and King himself does). That includes Pennywise and the dreaded Neibolt House, too. We’re not saying Pennywise lives in Elton’s house in The Running Man, it’s just a bit of a creepy coincidence.
The Running Man opens in theaters Nov. 14.
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