The Running Man: An exercise in how to bear the loosest possible relationship with your source material.

During the 1980s, an author by the name of Stephen King was in such wide circulation that a new film based on one of his novels seemed to be getting released every year. With the film industry of the 1980s progressively showing greater and greater effects of deregulation, and the competition becoming more akin to a street fight, adaptations of King novels progressed in identifiable stages. Specifically, faithful (somewhat), loose, looser, and related only by title.

Predator 2, a study in how to gracefully kick oneself in the groin

In the mid-to-late 1980s, a joke was circulating around Hollywood that the only person Rocky Balboa, Sylvester Stallone‘s first and arguably most interesting stock character, had not fought yet was E.T.. This prompted a couple of screenwriters to hammer out a “treatment” for a film in which a type more commensurate with Rambo would fight with an alien creature of similar disposition. Contracts were exchanged, money was allocated, stars were solicited, and in 1987 the result was released to theatres as Predator.