Runner is the Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson action comedy that Angel Studios opens wide on Friday, September 11. As of Monday, September 7, at 1:10 AM ET, its Rotten Tomatoes page reads 50% on 12 reviews: six critics liked it, six did not. Kalshi's board on the film's score, ticker KXRT-RUN, settles on whatever number that page shows at 10:00 AM ET on Monday, September 14. Its most-held contract asks whether the score will be above 50. A 50 is not above 50. The contract carrying 29,186 contracts of open interest is sitting exactly on its own resolution line, with the entire wide-release review wave still to come, and it is priced at 54 cents bid against 56 offered.
The pool is so small that the next single review moves the displayed score four points in either direction, to 54 or to 46, an eight-point swing between the two outcomes, and either print puts the Above 50 contract on the right or wrong side of the line for as long as it lasts. That is the kind of board this is, and what it rewards is counting: not whether the movie is good, but how many reviews arrive by next Monday morning and what fraction of them are positive. I wrote up Onslaught's board on its opening eve last Thursday, and the Saturday edition of that page, and the two together taught me one lesson I keep applying here, that the size of the review wave matters as much as its tone. The strike-by-strike arithmetic follows, along with a Sunday-night trade tape that repriced four strikes in 71 seconds and never touched the pivot strike, Above 55, the one whose price decides the ladder's shape.
These are market prices and model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange. Kalshi requires users to be 18+ under its own platform policy, and availability varies by state. Rotten Tomatoes has not endorsed these markets; references to Rotten Tomatoes here are descriptive only.
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The Quick Answer
Kalshi's Runner market, KXRT-RUN, settles on the film's Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer at 10:00 AM ET on Monday, September 14, three days after the film's wide release, and each strike pays only if the score is strictly above it. With the page reading 50% on 12 reviews early Monday, the "Above 50" contract was quoted at 54 cents bid against 56 offered, "Above 45" at 64 against 68, "Above 55" at 42 against 51, and "Above 60" at 12 against 14. From six positive reviews of 12, one more positive review prints a 54 and one more negative prints a 46, so Above 50 changes sides on every review until the pool gets big enough to settle down. Read the ladder as a distribution and it puts about a one-in-three chance on the score finishing at 45 or lower, another third on a finish between 56 and 60, and only about a fifth on the ten-point band, 46 to 55, that the score currently sits in. The oddest price on the board is the Above 55 quote, nine cents wide with 13 contracts on the offer, because where it settles inside that spread decides whether the hollow middle is a real view about the wide-release wave or a thin market. The full board, the review count each strike needs from the coming wave, and the tape behind that hollow are below.
How Four Of Five Became Six Of Twelve
The first reviews were kind. MovieWeb's September 2 roundup, published at 1:23 PM ET that Wednesday, counted five reviews on the page, four of them positive and no score displayed yet, and quoted TheWrap's verdict that director Scott Waugh had found the balance between the action and the comedy. William Bibbiani's review at TheWrap, also dated September 2, went further: "Scott Waugh knows better. He does a masterful job of balancing funny characters and seriously sick beatdowns and explosions." Flickering Myth gave it three and a half stars the same day, and JoBlo scored it 7 out of 10, writing that "Runner does not reinvent the buddy action movie but still keeps some surprises up its sleeve." The premise those critics were reviewing is a 97-minute, PG-13 chase: Ritchson plays Hank Malone, a former soldier working as a courier in Australia, who has to get a donor liver and the medical technician traveling with it, Owen Wilson's Ben Bishop, to a sick girl while a cartel tries to take the organ for itself. The premise matters to the count because of who filed first and what they split on. The early five were the genre and trade outlets that show up for a Ritchson action vehicle, and the axis they divided on was the same one: Bibbiani liked the "funny characters and seriously sick beatdowns" in the same frame, while The Hollywood Reporter's Frank Scheck, quoted in ComingSoon's roundup carried by Yahoo, found the "ultra-violent mayhem simply doesn't fit well" beside the comedy. A wide-release wave of general-audience critics will judge that mix from further outside the genre than the first five did.
By Thursday morning the count had grown and the tone had turned. The same ComingSoon roundup, published at 7:35 AM ET on September 3, reported that "only nine reviews have been made on Rotten Tomatoes so far" and, in the same piece, that "four out of five critics have found the film a pleasant surprise," a line that reads as the early split rather than a fresh count. Metacritic lists the Reporter's review at 50 out of 100, with the excerpt that "the brutality becomes off-putting after a while," and TheWrap's at 83, with no Metascore yet because the site has only three reviews and needs four. At 12:30 PM ET on Thursday The A.V. Club filed the sharpest negative, under the headline "Reacher takes his big action guy bona fides on the run in the otherwise forgettable Runner," and its verdict is the one that sticks: "the movie loses all steam whenever Ritchson's not on screen." The same review calls much of the film "a watery sketch for a leaner, or more focused, stunt showcase."
Two dated counts bracket the damage. On Saturday afternoon, September 5, at 2:15 PM ET, an editor updated the film's Wikipedia entry to read "55% of 11 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 5.2/10." A 55 on 11 reviews can only be six positive against five, because six of 11 is 54.55, and the fact that the site displayed 55 rather than 54 shows that Rotten Tomatoes rounds to the nearest whole number rather than truncating. What it does with an exact half-point comes from the Coyote vs. Acme settlement on August 31, when a raw 95.50 printed as 96: the half rounds up. At my pull early Monday the page reads 50% on 12, six liked and six not, with an average rating of 5.10. Set MovieWeb's Wednesday count beside Monday's and the seven reviews that arrived after the first five ran two positive, five negative. The film opened with critics at four-in-five and has run two-in-seven since.
That clip is the whole board. The wide release brings the bulk of the reviews, from regional and general-audience critics who were not at the early screenings, and whether they file closer to the first five or the next seven is the only thing the ten strikes on KXRT-RUN are pricing.
The Tape: Priced In The 60s On Wednesday, Swept On Sunday Night
The market listed at 10:00 PM ET on Monday, August 31, with ten strikes from Above 45 to Above 90 in five-point steps, and its first print came at 5:31 AM ET on Tuesday: a single contract of Above 60 bought at 92 cents. Each contract pays $1 if the Tomatometer is above its strike at settlement and nothing if it is not; if cents-to-probability is new to you, our Kalshi odds explainer covers the conversion, what the price means covers the caveats, and how prediction markets work covers the basics. Tuesday's sellers took Above 60 as low as 41 cents before it closed the day at 68, and Wednesday, the day MovieWeb published its four-of-five count, was the board's warmest: Above 65 traded up to 66 cents, Above 60 to 75, Above 55 to 87 and Above 50 to 93. Read together, Wednesday's ladder put the market's coin-flip point at a score in the high 60s, a Fresh movie with room to spare.
Thursday was the first re-mark, and it followed the reviews rather than leading them. Above 65 went from 66 cents to 27 on the day, Above 60 from 72 to 49, Above 55 from 83 to 71, and Above 50 from 91 to 78, with sellers crossing the spread for 1,860 contracts of Above 65 against 103 for buyers. Friday continued it in two bursts: 3,017 contracts of Above 60 sold in the 9:00 AM ET hour, the largest of them 1,964 contracts at 45 cents at 9:41, and 4,885 contracts of Above 65 sold in the 3:00 PM hour, led by 1,896 at 20 cents at 3:41 PM, with the tail of that order clearing as low as a nickel. Above 55, which had held around 70 cents for most of Friday, cracked at 11:43 PM when a seller hit it for 1,973 contracts at 64.
The overnight into Saturday finished the job on the 60 strike. At 3:35:52 AM ET on Saturday, five prints in the same second sold 7,361 contracts of Above 60 down the book, led by 2,012 at 25 cents, 2,500 at 20 and 2,682 at 15 with two small fills of 16 and 150 contracts between them, and the contract has traded no higher than 31 since. Above 55 followed at 7:45 AM, 1,932 contracts sold at 50 cents, and spent the rest of Saturday between 48 and 55. Above 50 wobbled to a 50-cent low in Saturday's 3:00 AM hour, printed 77 in the 1:00 PM hour, and was trading between 69 and 73 when Wikipedia's 55-on-11 edit landed at 2:15 PM: a score five points above the strike that mattered, still Rotten, and a market that still made it about a seven-in-ten favorite to hold above 50.
Sunday is where the tape gets interesting, because the buyers showed up first. In the 1:00 PM ET hour on Sunday a buyer crossed the spread for 1,439 contracts of Above 55, 1,382 of them inside a single minute at 1:22 PM, paying 51 to 76 cents with the biggest print 1,000 contracts at 64. That buyer was taking the view that the score would finish at 56 or better, and it was the largest buy-side order on the strike since Wednesday, when a 3,000-contract buy at 86 cents went through on a board still pricing a Fresh finish. It did not hold. Sellers took Above 55 back down through the 6:00 PM hour, 1,201 contracts sold against 481 bought and a low of 38, and then, between 10:11 and 10:12 PM ET, one 71-second sequence repriced four strikes at once. At 10:11:08 PM, 4,913 contracts of Above 65 sold in two prints at 8 and 9 cents. At 10:11:23, 100 contracts of Above 70 sold at 4. At 10:12:04, 5,926 contracts of Above 50 sold in six prints from 57 cents down to 50. At 10:12:19, 4,958 contracts of Above 45 sold in five prints from 73 cents down to 60. That is 15,897 contracts across four strikes, every one of them a seller crossing the spread, and it is what the overnight watchers saw as a ladder-wide collapse: Kalshi's reference prices from the prior session showed Above 45 at 87, Above 50 at 74 and Above 65 at 12, and by my pull three hours later the asks read 68, 56 and 5. Above 60, at 29 on the same reference and 14 at the pull, was not in the 71-second window; its re-mark came an hour later, at 11:21 PM, when one print sold 2,085 contracts at 15 cents.
The takeaway from the tape: the Sunday-night sweep was one seller's 71 seconds across four strikes, and the market only partly followed it. Above 45 printed 60 in the sweep and was bid 64 three hours later; Above 50 printed 50 and was bid 54. The whole-week drift, from a coin-flip point in the high 60s on Wednesday to the low 50s today, is the real re-mark.
The one contested strike that neither the sweep nor the 11:21 print touched is Above 55. It did not trade in that 71-second window at all, and it is the strike I keep coming back to, because it is the one whose price decides whether the ladder makes sense. In the hour after midnight it traded 130 contracts across a range from 41 to 63 cents and last printed 50; at the pull it was quoted 42 bid against 51 offered, a nine-cent spread with 87 contracts on the bid and 13 on the ask. Every other contested strike was quoted within two to four cents. The board that follows shows why that one wide quote matters more than the sweep did, which is as clean an example of what actually moves a prediction market as the Onslaught board was last week: a handful of reviews, arriving in a pool small enough that each one counts, and a market that reprices in bursts when someone decides the count has changed.
The Board: Every Strike On KXRT-RUN
The ladder is ten strikes, Above 45 through Above 90. The five from Above 70 up are dead, priced between a penny and a nickel with almost no bid behind them, though Above 80, Above 85 and Above 90 still carry 35,576 contracts of open interest between them, the residue of a first week when this board still priced a Fresh finish. Above 65 is nearly dead, 3 bid against 5. The contest lives on four strikes, Above 45 through Above 60, and the table shows all ten as pulled from the exchange at 1:10 AM ET on Monday, September 7, 2026. "Cost to buy" is the ask, the price a buyer actually pays; the bid is what a seller gets.
The ten-strike board as pulled at 1:10 AM ET on Monday, September 7; the graphic shows the bid on the five lowest strikes, where all of the contested money sits.
| Strike | Bid / Cost To Buy | Last Trade | 24h Volume (contracts) | Open Interest (contracts) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Above 45 | 64¢ / 68¢ | 64¢ | 5,851 | 22,182 |
| Above 50 | 54¢ / 56¢ | 56¢ | 7,124 | 29,186 |
| Above 55 | 42¢ / 51¢ | 50¢ | 4,424 | 21,026 |
| Above 60 | 12¢ / 14¢ | 13¢ | 5,251 | 20,135 |
| Above 65 | 3¢ / 5¢ | 5¢ | 4,983 | 10,002 |
| Above 70 | 3¢ / 4¢ | 4¢ | 424 | 3,601 |
| Above 75 | 3¢ / 5¢ | 4¢ | 56 | 4,599 |
| Above 80 | 0¢ / 2¢ | 2¢ | 591 | 12,101 |
| Above 85 | 0¢ / 1¢ | 1¢ | 0 | 14,652 |
| Above 90 | 0¢ / 1¢ | 1¢ | 0 | 8,823 |
Prices as of September 7, 2026, pulled at 1:10 AM ET. The 24-hour volume column sums to roughly 28,700 contracts, of which 15,897 traded in the 71-second Sunday-night sweep. Above 55's quote is the widest on the board; the 51-cent ask had 13 contracts behind it at the pull.
The row to stare at is Above 50, and the reason is in the last column: 29,186 contracts of open interest, the most on the board, sitting on a strike that the current score does not clear. A 50 resolves Above 50 as No. The 54-to-56 quote says the market makes the score slightly more likely than not to be at 51 or better when the snapshot is taken, which is a statement about the coming wave and nothing else, because the 12 reviews already on the page have it dead on the line.
Now take the midpoints down the ladder, halfway between bid and ask, and difference each rung from the one above it to get the market's probability for each band of final scores. Above 45 at 66, Above 50 at 55, Above 55 at 46.5, Above 60 at 13, Above 65 at 4. The bands fall out: 34 points on a finish of 45 or lower, 11 points on 46 to 50, 8.5 points on 51 to 55, 33.5 points on 56 to 60, 9 points on 61 to 65, and a few points scattered above that. The distribution has two humps. A third of the market's weight is on the film finishing well below where it sits today, and another third is on it finishing five to ten points above; the ten-point band the score is actually in, 46 to 55, gets less than a fifth. Where the Above 55 quote lands inside its spread decides how hollow that middle is: at the 42-cent bid, the 51-to-55 band is 13 points and the 56-to-60 band is 29; at the 51-cent ask, the bands are 4 and 38. Either way the ladder is saying that if the wide-release wave is warm enough to lift the score above 50 at all, it will most likely carry it past 55 too, and that a lukewarm wave, one that leaves the score in the low 50s, is the least likely outcome of the three. That is a strong view about the temperature of a set of reviews nobody has read yet, and the one strike carrying it has 13 contracts on its offer.
There is a smaller inconsistency higher up, and it is worth naming because it shows what a dead rung looks like. Above 70 is quoted 3 against 4 and Above 75 is quoted 3 against 5; the midpoints are 3.5 and 4, so the strike that is harder to clear is priced a half-cent higher than the one below it, which implies a negative probability on a finish between 71 and 75. Nothing is wrong with the exchange. Both rungs have a 3-cent bid of 100 contracts from someone willing to own the tail cheaply and an ask stacked thousands deep, 3,057 contracts at 4 cents on the 70 and 4,002 at 5 cents on the 75, and since Saturday the trades on either have printed at 8 cents or less. A displayed quote on a strike nobody is contesting is not a probability, and the reader who converts every rung on a ladder into a percentage should treat those two as noise. The four contested strikes are where the money has spoken.
The Arithmetic Of The Next Review
The current score is a raw 50.00, six of 12, and the settlement rule is strict: the score has to be above the strike, so Above 50 needs a displayed 51, which means a raw score of at least 50.5 under the half-up rounding the 55-on-11 snapshot confirmed. Every strike has a plain review count attached to it, and the counts are small.
One review decides the next print. A positive review makes it seven of 13, a raw 53.85 that displays as 54. A negative makes it six of 13, a 46. The Above 50 contract, priced at 55 cents, changes sides on the very next notice that posts, and it keeps changing sides on single reviews until the pool grows.
Above 45 dies on two straight negatives. Six of 14 is 42.86, a 43. The strike the market prices at two-in-three is two bad reviews from a 43.
Above 55 clears on two straight positives. Eight of 14 is 57.14, a 57. The strike quoted at 42 to 51 is two good reviews from being in the money.
Above 60 needs four straight positives. Ten of 16 is 62.5, a 63; three straight only reach nine of 15, a 60, which resolves Above 60 as No.
Those single-direction runs are the edges of the picture, and the wide release will not deliver reviews one direction at a time. Pools this size move by composition, so the useful question is how many positives each strike needs out of a wave of a given size. Onslaught's page went from 69 reviews at my opening-eve pull on Thursday, September 3, to 106 by the Monday morning after its wide release; Runner starts from 12, so its wave will be most of its final count. The table runs three wave sizes.
| Strike | Score it needs on Sept 14 | Straight run that decides it now | Positives needed in the next 20 | In the next 40 | In the next 80 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Above 45 | 46 or higher | Two negatives in a row break it | 9 of 20 (45%) | 18 of 40 (45%) | 36 of 80 (45%) |
| Above 50 | 51 or higher | One review flips it either way | 11 of 20 (55%) | 21 of 40 (53%) | 41 of 80 (51%) |
| Above 55 | 56 or higher | Two positives in a row clear it | 12 of 20 (60%) | 23 of 40 (58%) | 46 of 80 (58%) |
| Above 60 | 61 or higher | Four positives in a row clear it | 14 of 20 (70%) | 26 of 40 (65%) | 50 of 80 (63%) |
Arithmetic from six positive of 12 reviews, the split behind the 50% shown early Monday, with Rotten Tomatoes rounding to the nearest whole number. Two cells shift by one review under truncation: Above 55 in the next 40 would need 24, and Above 60 in the next 80 would need 51. Every other cell holds either way.
The row that matters is the middle one. Above 50 needs the wave to run 51% to 55% positive depending on its size, and the bigger the wave, the closer that bar sits to a coin flip; at 80 more reviews the film needs 41 of them, and 40 of 80 lands the raw score at exactly 50.00, which pays nothing. An even split is the one result on this board that the Above 50 buyer cannot survive, and it is the result the last 12 reviews produced.
Feed the two clips the pool has already shown through the same arithmetic and only one of the ladder's two humps lines up. The next seven reviews ran two of seven; a wave of 40 at that clip lands the score at 34 and a wave of 80 at 31, which makes Above 45 a zero, and the market's 34 points on a finish at 45 or lower is that clip carried forward. The first five ran four of five, and a wave at that clip does not land in the upper hump at all: 40 more reviews at 80% positive put the score at 73 and 80 more put it at 76, which pays every contested strike and Above 70 besides, a rung the market prices at three and a half cents. The 56-to-60 band the market loads with 33.5 points corresponds to a wave running about 58% to 62% positive, cooler than the opening five by a wide margin and warmer than the last seven by a wider one. So the market is pricing the cold clip continuing, and a partial rebound, and almost nothing else: a repeat of the first five gets a few cents across the whole top of the ladder, and an even split, the one outcome that leaves the score where it sits today, gets the hollow.
My read, and it is a read rather than a count, is that the hollow middle is a thin-market artifact more than a considered view. The 6-of-12 pool is the coldest count the page has shown, it arrived from the critics who file earliest, and the reviews those critics wrote were not split between raves and pans so much as between "surprisingly fun" and "forgettable," which is the profile of a movie that lands in the 50s on a bigger sample rather than the 30s or the 60s. The counter-argument has a number behind it too: Wednesday's early reviewers were the genre and trade outlets that show up for a Ritchson vehicle, and the two-of-seven clip since is what a broader set of critics did with the same film. If that clip is the true rate, 34 points on a sub-46 finish is not a hollow at all, and the 64-cent bid on Above 45 is the generous price on the board. At 55 cents, a $100 stake in Above 50 gets about $182 back, stake included, if the print reaches 51 and nothing if it does not, before Kalshi's fee of roughly two cents a contract at that price; the reader who wants either side of the line should re-run the one-review and two-review arithmetic against whatever count the page shows when they look, because 12 will not be the number for long.
What September 14 At 10:00 AM ET Actually Settles
The snapshot is the whole game, and on a 12-review base it is unusually cruel. A review that posts at 9:59 AM ET next Monday counts in full and moves the score by whole points; one that posts at 10:01 AM counts for nothing. Two clauses in Kalshi's rules do all the work. The first is the sentence on each contract, with the strike swapped in: "If Runner has a Tomatometer score of above 45 on Sep 14, 2026 at 10:00 AM ET, then the market resolves to Yes." The second is the tie rule, in Kalshi's own example: a score of 75 resolves "Above 75" as No. The Fresh and Certified Fresh labels are "for illustrative purposes only," and so is the badge in every headline this week; the market reads a number, once. The Verified Audience score, empty at the pull, counts for nothing either, however many of the 97,911 tickets Angel Studios' own site showed sold toward its 100,000-ticket Guild milestone at the same early-Monday pull get used. We wrote up the mechanics, including the End of Oak Street board where an exact 85 was the central risk going into an Above 85 snapshot, in the Kalshi Rotten Tomatoes markets explainer, and the payout timeline is in how Kalshi settlement works.
The worked example that should be on every reader's mind is the one settling this morning. Onslaught's board settles at 10:00 AM ET today, Monday, September 7. On Saturday morning that film read 53% on 98 reviews and its Above 55 contract was quoted at 7 cents bid against 8 offered; the Saturday edition of our page said it needed six positives in a row just to get back to 56. At my pull early Monday the Onslaught page reads 56% on 106, which means the eight reviews that arrived between Saturday morning and Monday's small hours ran seven positive against one negative, and a contract that cost 8 cents on Saturday is, about nine hours before its snapshot, sitting on the paying side of the line. That is the size-of-the-wave lesson in one weekend: a small wave with a strong tilt moved a 98-review score three points. Runner's wave starts from 12, so the same eight reviews at the same tilt would move its score from 50 to 65.
- Onslaught Rotten Tomatoes Score: Will It Hold On Kalshi?
- By Any Means Rotten Tomatoes: Traders Beat The Write-Ups To The Drop
- Coyote Vs. Acme Rotten Tomatoes: 96 Held. The Margin Was Zero
- Kalshi Rotten Tomatoes Markets: How Contracts Settle
- How Kalshi Settlement Works
- What Actually Moves A Prediction Market
The Bottom Line
Strip the badge off and this board is asking one question in four prices: what fraction of the reviews that land between now and next Monday morning will be positive? Above 45 at 66 says two-in-three that the wave runs at least 45% positive. Above 50 at 55 says a shade better than even that it runs at least 51% to 55%. Above 55 at 46.5 says a shade worse than even that it runs about 58%. Above 60 at 13 says one-in-eight that it runs 63% to 70%. The next seven reviews ran 29%, and the ladder's lower hump is that clip carried forward. Its upper hump is a wave near 60% positive, a partial rebound rather than a repeat of the opening five, whose 80% clip would land the score in the 70s that the top of the ladder prices at a few cents combined. The one outcome the market has left nearly empty is the average of the two, an even split that leaves the score where it sits today.
The part I keep coming back to is that the sweep on Sunday night, 15,897 contracts in 71 seconds, did not touch the strike that carries the ladder's shape. Above 55 sits between the two humps on a nine-cent spread with 13 contracts on its offer, and whether that quote drifts toward its bid or its ask over the week will say more about what traders believe than the sweep did. Above 50 is the strike with the most money on it and the least margin, none at all, and the next review, whichever way it goes, will move the score four points in a direction that lasts exactly until the review after that.
Runner opens on Friday. The score that Kalshi reads at 10:00 AM ET on September 14 will be built almost entirely from reviews that do not exist yet, and this page will be graded against it. You can follow how these boards grade out, across politics, sports and entertainment, when you browse every live market board on the prediction markets hub.
