Last Wednesday, the Western movie The Harder They Fall premiered on Netflix, and along with being praised left and right, it’s collecting a lot of views on the streaming service. While the movie easily stands as a standalone story, it also ends in a way where its surviving characters could return someday. Naturally though, as with the first movie, we’d chiefly follow with Jonathan Majors’ Nat Young, who hunted down the man who murdered his parents, Idris Elba’s Rufus Buck, during The Harder They Fall.
So what are the chances The Harder They Fall will get a sequel? During an interview with EW, Jonathan Majors said that he will play Nat Young as long as director and co-writer Jeymes Samuel wants him to. However, the actor known from projects like Da 5 Bloods, Lovecraft Country and Loki said that it might be a better idea to go the prequel route with a The Harder They Fall follow-up. Majors explained his reasoning as follows:
The most interesting thing about Nat Love is what happened to him from the time he was 10 to the time we meet him at 33 in the picture. What is that moment? How was that growing up?
Warning: SPOILERS for The Harder They Fall are ahead!
Although most of the main characters in The Harder They Fall are based on historical figures, the events of the movie are fictional. In Nat Young’s case, his parents were murdered by Rufus Buck when he was just a boy, leading him to spent the next two decades establishing himself as a notorious outlaw and searching for any lead that would bring him face to face with Buck again so he could exact vengeance. Young ultimately succeeded, though not before learning from Buck that the two of them had the same father, and the reason Buck killed him was revenge for murdering his mother. With Buck now dead, and Delroy Lindo’s Bass Reeves having agreed to report Young as having died in the climactic conflict, Jonathan Majors’ character has now headed to parts unknown with Zazie Beetz’s Stagecoach Mary by his side.
That, along with the reveal at the end of The Harder They Fall that Regina King’s Trudy Smith, Rufus Buck’s second-in-command, survived, is more than enough groundwork for this saga to continue in a sequel, but Jonathan Majors is also game for exploring an earlier chapter of Nat Young’s life to provide additional context for how he ended up the way he did. As for filmmaker Jeymes Samuel, he made it clear that whether The Harder They Fall gets a sequel or prequel, this story is meant to continue past one movie. In his words:
The world of The Harder We Fall is expansive, so I'm not stopping there... [The film was] never, for me, a singular story. It has a before and an after. So I'll leave that there without spoilers, but let's just say we're going in.
We’ll just have to wait and see whether Netflix is interested a follow-up movie in one form or another, though considering The Harder They Fall’s critical reception and how many subscribers are watching it, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s already under consideration. Along with the aforementioned actors, The Harder They Fall also stars LaKeith Stanfield, RJ Cyler, Danielle Deadwyler, Edi Gathegi, Deon Cole and Damon Wayans Jr. Jeymes Samuel co-wrote the script with Boaz Yakin.
Naturally we’ll let you know if the saga of The Harder They Fall stretches into another movie, but for now, look through our Netflix November 2021 guide to learn what else the streaming service has coming up.
