20 Recent Movies With INSANE Twists

When Edgar Wright announced that his new adaptation of Stephen King's dystopian novel The Running Man would be more source-faithful, many questioned just how far he'd be able to take that.

After all, King's novel famously concludes with our hero, Ben Richards, flying a plane into the skyscraper HQ of the Games Network, killing both himself and The Running Man's producer Dan Killian.

Given that Hollywood has generally tended away from depicting such sequences since 9/11, it didn't seem hugely likely that Wright would be able to get away with it, and so he instead bamboozled audiences with a bait-and-switch.

At first, the film's climax indeed appears to be closing out in a similar fashion, with Ben's (Glen Powell) plane being hijacked by Killian (Josh Brolin), piloted towards the network's HQ, and then shot out of the sky, killing Ben.

But a few seconds after the plane explodes in a fireball, the scene is interrupted by the activist known as The Apostle (Daniel Ezra), who reveals that Ben ejected out of the plane just before it was blown up.

Furthermore, his original discussion with Killian on the plane is leaked to the world, inciting a rebellion, Ben reunites with his family - whose deaths were faked - and he even gets to kill Killian at the end.

While there are clear reasons why Wright couldn't fully commit to King's original ending, getting so close and then pulling the rug out from under the audience just ended up pissing off the novel's fans.