Netflix’s New Western Movie Saddles up to Top 10 Just 1 Day After Its Debut

Netflix has a bonafide hit on its hands. The streaming service’s new western, The Harder They Fall, was released on Wednesday, Nov. 3, and it has shot to the top of the Netflix charts. Despite only being available to stream for one day, The Harder They Fall is already ranked No. 2. overall. 

The Harder They Fall stars Jonathan Majors, Idris Elba, Regina King, Zazie Beetz, Lakeith Stanfield, Delroy Lindo, Edi Gathegi, and Deon Cole. Majors plays a cowboy named Nat Love who looks to get revenge on Rufu Buck (Elba) as he killed his parents when he was young. Nat rounds up his gang to take on Black and his crew in an epic battle. PopCulture.com recently spoke to Majors and he revealed what drew him to the film. 

“When I read it, I felt this was an impossible character, Nat Love was, because of what was being asked of him, all the people he got to interact with, it just seemed unreal to me,” Majors told PopCulture. “Yeah, you add on top of that, that all our heroes, all our characters are part of the African American, I guess, the African diaspora. I thought, ‘Well, that’s just a beautiful thought. I’d like to be part of that.’”

The Harder They Fall is a fictional story, but Nat Love was a real cowboy. The film focuses on Love and his crew battling Rufus Black, who is played by Idris Elba. “The magnitude of his presence is new and he has such command over his energetic output,” Majors said when talking about working with Elba.

“I remember in the final scene, actually, he said something to me, he actually said something to our director, Jeymes [Samuel], he said, ‘We’ve got to get back,’ and he was talking about something that’s happening on the other side of the camera in regards to the performance on my end, that he was seeing something that I was doing and he felt that he wanted to make sure that was in the movie, that big brother-ship, looking after the film and looking after the younger actor and the younger man in the moment. That’s a little story about how tight we became.”

“It is a buffet of entertainment, a buffet of catharsis, a buffet of historical relevance and zeitgeist contributing factors,” Majors said. “The music is the music. The way we cooperate in order to build the story, the way we collaborated in order to chisel out this statue that is The Harder They Fall. You will get a lot. There’s a lot there. If you want gluten-free, watch this scene. If you want meat, watch this scene. It’s all there, it’s all there.”