This article contains spoilers for The Running Man (2025).
There are a number of burning questions lingering at the end of Edgar Wright’s adaptation of Stephen King/Richard Bachman’s The Running Man. How effective is the revolution fomented by Ben Richards (Glen Powell)? What happened to Amelia Williams (Emilia Jones) after she jumped out of a plane? But the one question that burns brighter than a boarding house lit up by accidentally ignited adult magazines is: Why isn’t Pennywise the Dancing Clown in The Running Man?
Okay, this probably requires some explanation, so let’s take a step back. This newest iteration of The Running Man takes place in the near-distant future as we follow Richards on the run as part of the titular game show. He needs to stay alive for 30 days while the world reports on him and elite Hunters, including the masked McCone (Lee Pace), track him down. Over the course of the two-hour-plus movie, Richards stays on the move throughout the East Coast, traveling from what is likely New York City (though not specified) to Boston to – and this is where Pennywise comes into play – Derry, Maine.
That last town is a classic fictional location from multiple King stories and novels, with the first reference appearing in his 1981 short story, “The Bird and the Album.” Following further references in The Running Man – published under the Bachman pen name on May 4, 1982 – and Different Seasons’ “The Body” (later the basis for Stand by Me) that same year, it then turned up in Pet Sematary in 1983, and two other short stories. “Uncle Otto’s Truck” (also 1983) and 1984’s “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” were later collected in the 1985 anthology, Skeleton Crew.
While King set more stories in the town of Castle Rock, and only three books were set mostly in Derry proper (including 11/22/63 and Insomnia), there is of course one novel that is most associated with the town: 1986’s It. You’re probably familiar with the bones of that one thanks to the resurgent popularity of the novel tied to the HBO prequel series, It: Welcome to Derry, but the short version is that there’s an evil clown named Pennywise who lives in the sewers and eats children. He’s also a supernatural alien/avatar of chaos who is nearly immortal until a bunch of kids known as the Losers Club yell at him until he dies.
Midway through the new 2025 film adaptation of The Running Man, Richards is sent to what’s supposed to be a safehouse thanks to Bradley Throckmorton (Daniel Ezra), a rebel against the Games Network that controls every aspect of American life and produces The Running Man game show. Richards flips over a card handed to him by Throckmorton to show the address he’s headed to, and if you’ve seen the movie, you likely heard a laugh of recognition from the audience when it’s revealed that he’s heading to Derry.
Welcome to… Well, You Know
Once Richards gets there, he does not encounter Pennywise at any point, nor does he head into a sewer or visit the house on Neibolt Street that offers access to Pennywise’s domain. There are no red balloons or other noticeable references to It; nobody floats down here in The Running Man, because they’re too busy running. Instead, Richards heads to the house of Elton Parrakis (Michael Cera), an inventor who publishes zines trying to take down the system, and who has a very complicated relationship with hot dogs.
Even though there is no real connection to the events of It in the movie’s Derry sequence, it’s difficult to get It out of your mind. Parrakis lives with his insane mother, Victoria (Sandra Dickinson), who has been damaged by past events in Derry thanks to her husband – Elton’s dad – being beaten up and killed thanks to his rebel hot dog cart (there’s more to it, but that’s the broad strokes). She’s very reminiscent of the also-damaged Pennywise-infected adults from It, in particular the sweaty, creepy Mrs. Kersh (Joan Gregson) from It Chapter Two.
To be clear, Victoria is definitely not Pennywise; she’s just a crazy old lady. But when Richards and Parrakis are attacked by the police, the sequence ends with them sliding down a firepole to an area below Parrakis’s house. It’s hard at that point not to think, “Underground in Derry? That’s where Pennywise lives!” Sure, it’s a secret tunnel and not a sewer, but wouldn’t it have been great if Pennywise popped his terrifying head into the action? And you know who loves secret tunnels? Pennywise the Dancing Clown!
Not Clowning Around
There are several good reasons Pennywise is not in The Running Man. The simplest, most straightforward, and easily the most boring reason is that the two movies, despite both being based on Stephen King novels, are from two different companies; It, its sequel, and the currently running prequel miniseries are all produced by Warner Bros. Discovery, and The Running Man is produced by Paramount. While that wouldn’t necessarily preclude including a reference to It in The Running Man, having actor Bill Skårsgard show up in full clown gear would likely be a no-go. Sure, these kinds of character trades have happened between companies before – see the complicated rights between Sony and Disney re: Spider-Man for more on that – but figuring out contracts so a clown can briefly appear in an otherwise unrelated movie just doesn’t make a lot of business sense.
Okay, that was no fun, so let’s pivot to some less dry explanations. One of them? The Running Man takes place in the future. While the new movie doesn’t specify the time period, the original Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, which strays vastly from the book, is set in 2017. More to the point, the King/Bachman book is set in the unimaginable future year of 2025. Regardless of how the Wright/Powell movie squares with this, The Running Man is set beyond any known timeline for It, either in the movies or the book; that book is set in 1957-1958 and later in 1984-1985, while the recent movies are set in 1988-1989 and 2016.
Why specify this? Well – spoilers for the end of It – the Losers Club (aka the kids who were plagued by Pennywise) destroy the clown for good as adults. Even if for some insane reason the new Running Man is set in 2017 and links up with the timeline of the new movies, Pennywise was still defeated a year earlier. But given the more likely possibility that The Running Man is set sometime in “our” future, it’s been years if not decades since the Losers Club purged Derry of Pennywise’s influence. He can’t show up… because he’s dead.
Another very good reason Pennywise isn’t there is because while many of King’s books contain references to each other, canonically they’re all part of a King multiverse but not the same direct continuity. It’s likely that King was planting some fun easter eggs for fans throughout his writing, but didn’t start to tie them all together until his landmark fantasy series, The Dark Tower. The simple version presented there is that at the center of the multiverse is the titular Tower, and everything grows out of it like spokes of a wheel. So, for example, the events of It may have canonically happened in both Dreamcatcher and The Mist, but the events of Dreamcatcher did not happen in the world of The Mist and vice versa. There’s even a spoke of the King multiverse where King exists as a writer, which raises a whole host of other questions. Then there are King novels and stories that just exist as is, unconnected from anything else.
Different Spokes for Different Folks
Confusing, right? You really don’t need to worry about it unless you’re a hardcore King head, and even then, it’s not really important to the enjoyment of his novels. Given that King wrote The Running Man under his Bachman pen name years before he released It, there’s no reason to think the version of Derry that Richards visits and the version where Pennywise eats a little kid named Georgie are on the same spokes of the wheel anyway. It certainly could be that they are, but King has never specified whether the Bachman books – which also include Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), Thinner (1984), The Regulators (1996), and Blaze (2007) – are connected to his other work in any way other than that Derry mention and him existing as a writer in Thinner (remember, he wrote that as Bachman, so it sort of makes sense in that case).
But the real reason Pennywise isn’t in The Running Man? It’s because that would have been too hilarious, too awesome – perhaps the funniest thing ever committed to screen. Edgar Wright didn’t put Pennywise the Dancing Clown in The Running Man because, to not mince words, he’s a coward. A braver man would have had Pennywise pop up in that tunnel below Parrakis’ house and chase Glen Powell for the rest of the movie or at least to the Derry border before he gave up and went looking for some kids to snack on.
...Because that would have been too hilarious, too awesome – perhaps the funniest thing ever committed to screen. Or how about this? Have Pennywise as one of the contestants on The Running Man! The whole purpose of the game show is ostensibly to punish criminals, and Pennywise is a millennia-old child murderer. He’s a perfect contestant for Dan Killian (Josh Brolin), the show’s producer, to recruit. If you subbed Pennywise in for Ben Richards, though, the former would win The Running Man easily. While the movie tries to tell us that Richards is a master of disguise thanks to (poorly) gluing on a mustache, or pretending to be a blind priest, Pennywise can look like anyone or anything at any time. Unlike Powell, who just can’t hide his chiseled, pleasantly stubbled chin, Pennywise can look like a small child, or one of the Hunters, or even a giant clown-spider; the latter would probably draw too much attention, but he could do that if he wanted to. Heck, he could make himself into a mailbox so he could mail the daily video tapes that cause Richards so many problems throughout the movie.
Even beyond the whole disguise thing, nobody knows the sewers of Derry better than Pennywise. While McCone and his Hunters stumble around in the dark, Pennywise would always be two steps ahead of them, easily evading capture and winning the billion dollar prize at the end of 30 days. What would Pennywise, an ancient entity from a race known as Deadlights, do with that much money? That’s unclear, but it sure would be fun to watch.
You hear us, Paramount? Make that deal with WBD. The people want – nay, they demand – Pennywise to appear in a sequel, and I’ll see you in the theater in a few years when The Running Man 2: The Floating Man, Part 1 – Welcome (Back) To Derry comes out!
Connexion
