I Have Some Questions About the Betting System in The Running Man (1987)

Greetings, reader! If you haven’t seen The Running Man, today’s issue delves into some heavy spoiler territory. Chances are you’ve either seen The Running Man or you don’t care about having the later plot points of The Running Man revealed to you, but I’m doing my duty to keep film internet a kinder place. Enjoy!

The Running Man, as we all know, is a film that predicted the future. And by all accounts, this very silly movie did a better job of cultural prognosticating than we could’ve ever imagined in 1987.*

The United States has become a police state. The middle class has all but disappeared. The most powerful and politically influential man in the country is a bloodthirsty game show host. Lies are syndicated across the airwaves and bought wholesale by a populace eager to be distracted; as Ben Richards (played memorably by Arnold Schwarzenegger) tells us, “truth hasn’t been very popular lately.”** Did I mention that The Running Man begins in 2017?

But there’s an aspect of this dystopian prophecy that I don’t think gets enough credit: The legalization of sports betting.

In this future society, The Running Man is the most popular thing on TV. There’s no real indication that professional sports as we know it survived the worldwide economic collapse that ushered in this era, so this “game show”—which features convicted criminals (“runners”) being murdered by gladiator mercenaries (“stalkers”) in gory, unedited detail—is essentially sports.

Most of the film takes place in 2019. Consider our real-life American timeline for a moment. Sports betting was legalized in the spring of 2018 when the Supreme Court struck down the Amateur Sports Protection Act, giving rise to new gambling companies like DraftKings and allowing companies like Caesars Entertainment to mint their own sportsbook. Sure, we don’t know how long sports betting has been legal in The Running Man’s universe, but I think screenwriter Steven de Souza absolutely nailed this one.***

There’s one thing he didn’t exactly nail, though. The local oddsmakers for The Running Man are incredibly bad at their job.

As the events of the film unfold, Richards winds up imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit and then forced to fight for his life (alongside two friends, and eventually a third) on The Running Man. And, as seems to always be the case, the gambling market for the show is intense. Throughout the film, in an attempt to either raise the stakes or ground the story in faux reality, the action cuts to a pair of bookmakers on an outdoor stage with a chalkboard writing down the odds for various events related to the show.

And it’s a complete mess. The categories that they have written down are “1st Stalk,” “1st Blood,” “1st Kill,” and “Final Stalk.”**** These are essentially prop bets (since the contestants on The Running Man almost never actually win), which have certainly gained popularity in real America with folks out there betting on things like what color of Gatorade a winning coach will get showered in. But for this listing to be all prop bets is pretty wild.

“1st Stalk,” for example, is a classic prop bet where there is only a handful of outcomes but no real way to predict it other than past results. They’re betting on who the first stalker will be to enter the game and attempt to kill Ben and friends—a decision that is made by a member of the game show’s live studio audience. A woman named Edith chooses Sub-Zero, a big guy in a scary hockey uniform, and thus the bookies pay out accordingly.*****

There are plenty of issues with the betting system here. The odds are all way too low for there to be only two or three stalkers in play at a time. The uneven playing field (regular people with no weapons facing geared-up gladiators) makes the difference between “1st Blood” and “1st Kill” rather negligible. And the people are just throwing dollar bills at these guys and expecting them to organize fair payouts (one of my favorite movie tropes).

But the bookies’ biggest mistake is giving Ben Richards 100-1 odds. After he’s already killed three stalkers.

The decision is made hastily when a member of the Running Man studio audience confesses on camera that she’s rooting for Richards. It’s one of those classic goofy movie moments where everyone else is initially aghast before collectively changing their minds in an instant. Richards becomes a folk hero in the blink of an eye, so it would’ve been a mistake to not put him on the board at all.

But to give him 100-1 odds is insane. This might be the safest “long shot” in film history. First of all, there’s the aforementioned fact that Richards has already gotten the better of three opponents—something that has never happened once in the show’s history. Clearly he’s a force to be reckoned with. Consider also that, at this point in the game, two of Richards’ three friends have died, so it’s just him, a stalker named Fireball, and his love interest Amber out there. Why would any of them have such high odds, let alone the guy who has just rewired the entire format of the competition?******

Then again, this is The Running Man, a very unserious movie. Which is why, after Richards wins the game (and Amber’s heart), we see the same crowd of people feverishly celebrating the result—including the two bookies. Despite the fact that, one can only assume, they lost every dollar they had on that Richards listing and are probably in crippling debt. I hope they get pardoned by President Ben Richards in the years to come.

*Matt Singer, one of my favorite film writers, wrote a great piece in 2019 about just how many things The Running Man accurately predicted. It might be more than you think, folks!

**It is very funny to me that a man with Arnold’s extremely pronounced Central European accent would be named “Ben Richards.”

***I’m giving de Souza credit here because Stephen King’s novel actually takes place in 2025. Can’t wait to see which predictions of his come true next year!

****After coming up with the idea for today’s newsletter, I did some light research (my first mistake) and found that a website called Film Geeky wrote about the very same thing in 2015, so I did borrow from their research a bit. (They could do with a bit less plot summary, though.)

*****This is one of my favorite dystopian details of the film. The Running Man’s studio audience isn’t rabid young fraternity boys or gun-toting rednecks. It’s mostly sweet-looking middle-aged and elderly women.

******If we’re picking nits, the oddsmakers write Richards’ name in the “1st Stalk” category, which has already been nullified. As have “1st Blood” and “1st Kill” since those have also happened. One can only assume their intent is giving him 100-1 odds to win the game.

The Running Man is now streaming on Hoopla and PlutoTV, and it’s available to rent elsewhere.