Glen Powell blames Paramount merger for The Running Man's $41M box office shortfall

Glen Powell walked off the set of The Running Man carrying injuries that went deeper than the physical. In an interview with Esquire, the actor traced the film's commercial failure back to a decision made in a boardroom: Paramount's merger had prompted the studio to dismantle its entire marketing department just one month before the movie's release. The Running Man, Edgar Wright's adaptation of Stephen King's dystopian novel, had arrived with considerable expectations. Powell played a contestant forced into a deadly televised competition. But the film earned only $69 million worldwide against a $110 million budget—a $41 million shortfall that Powell attributes directly to the studio's internal upheaval.

The financial disappointment, however, was only part of the story. During production in Bulgaria, Powell suffered a ruptured tendon in his hand while filming a fight sequence. The injury was severe enough to land him in a hospital, where doctors discovered the tissue had been completely severed and that he'd developed a septic infection. Surgery followed immediately. Most actors in that position would have taken time to recover. Powell did not. Instead, the production team rewrote scenes to accommodate bandages on his hand, and he returned to set the very next day.

What followed was a sequence of shots that required him to scale an exterior wall in negative-ten-degree weather, wearing only a towel around his waist, filming with one functional arm. The decision to push forward came from a specific calculation: The Running Man had a locked release date, and Powell had another film waiting in the pipeline—J.J. Abrams's The Great Beyond. Delaying one meant jeopardizing the other. So he filmed through the pain, through the cold, through the infection that had only recently been treated.

Powell's reflection on the experience carries a note of hard-won wisdom. He acknowledged that the same pressure had affected another of his projects, the 2026 black comedy How to Make a Killing, which arrived and departed from theaters with minimal impact. "There were a lot of issues with that," he said. "There just was not enough time to do it properly." He framed it as a lesson learned: "I look back on that one as an example of going, You know what, there's no rush."

The actor's comments illuminate a tension that runs through modern filmmaking—the collision between corporate timelines and creative necessity. Paramount's merger created a specific crisis: the loss of institutional knowledge and marketing muscle at a moment when The Running Man needed both. But Powell's own choices reveal a parallel pressure, one that originates not in the studio's accounting department but in the actor's own commitment to the schedule. He chose not to delay. He chose to film injured. He chose to protect the release date even when his body was telling him to stop.

Looking ahead, Powell has two more films in development: The Great Beyond and Judd Apatow's The Comeback King, both slated for release next year. Whether those projects will benefit from the lessons Powell has drawn from The Running Man remains to be seen. What is clear is that the actor has begun to question the logic that made him film through a severed tendon in subzero conditions—the assumption that the schedule is sacred, that the release date cannot move, that the work must go on regardless of cost.