A Look Back At The Canned ‘Running Man’ Sequel

Did you know there were once serious plans to shoot a sequel to The Running Man, Schwarzenegger’s 1987 movie?  This will ring a bell to people with long memories.  The plans came about in 2002, or possibly earlier.  They wanted to cast Dennis Rodman as the latest man to run the gauntlet on the game show.  True story.

In 2002 Karen Craig was contracted to write a screenplay for the movie.  The Running Man 2 would feature an infamous athlete, Carter Riley – played by Rodman, who would be convicted of murdering a team mate and as a result of his transgression would be forced to appear on The Running Man game show.  The first draft was rejected and a second presented to Rodman in early 2003.  This version was accepted and things were seemingly to go ahead.

Production was to begin in Vancouver Canada in October 2003, a late 2004 release was planned.  The screenplay, as it happens featured the return of ‘Mad Dog’ Ben Richards (that boy’s one mean motherfucker!), yes that’s Arnold’s original character.  But they reduced this role to a cameo, presumably because they expected Arnold to turn the role down whereby the removal of his scene would’ve been easy to cut.

As for what happened to this movie, I don’t know.  But I would hazard a guess that it had something to do with some Rodman controversy.  Probably not a bad thing, would we really have wanted to see this?  Cool concept but the casting probably ultimately killed this one.  Every now and again a reboot rumor appears, I guess they’ll probably return to it at some point…