Have there been any Bass Reeves movies?

History is what you make of it. In the case of Bass Reeves’ history, it’s four movies, a dozen or so television appearances, and some of the wildest frontier lawman stories in the history of the West.

Reeves, who was born an enslaved person in Arkansas in 1838, lived a truly incredible life. At some point during the American Civil War, he made an escape from his captors. The details are fuzzy, but the prevailing theory is that he went to live with nearby Native Americans until the 13th Amendment kicked in, which would go a long way towards explaining his later familiarity with Native languages and the frontier in general. After a few years of farming, Reeves turned those skillsets into a job as a Deputy U.S. Marshall – the first Black Deputy to serve west of the mighty Mississippi. He would spend a storied career bringing in as many as 3,000 fugitives from justice, including his own son. Reeves killed 14 criminals in gunfights, one cook while he was cleaning his gun, and had both his hat and his belt shot off.

Dramatic, impressive, and hard not to root for, the life of Bass Reeves has been the basis of a handful of movies and television shows. The latest, Taylor Sheridan’s Lawmen: Bass Reeves, debuted on Paramount Plus on Nov. 5, 2023.

A year prior in 2022, the independent film Corsicana saw writer/director Isaiah Washington step into Reeves’ spurs in a story about the lawman tracking a group of outlaws across Texas. The year before that, The Good Fight’s Delroy Lindo played Reeves in Netflix’s historical action figure fight The Harder They Fall. 

David Gyasi, star of the Amazon Prime series Carnival Row, played Bass Reeves in the 2019 direct-to-streaming film Hell on the Border, alongside once-and-future Hellboy Ron Perlman and The Paul T. Goldman Chronicles star Frank Grillo. 2013 saw DCEU regular Harry Lennix as Reeves in The Die by Dawn. Meanwhile, Amazon has been mum about a Bass Reeves biopic helmed by The Eternals director Chloe Zhao since they first announced it in 2018. Twin Territories, a separate project produced by Morgan Freeman, was ordered to series by Amazon in 2022.

Reeves’ unique place in history has also made him an easy target for sci-fi, fantasy, and speculative fiction stories. For examples of what one of America’s most iconic lawmen would have looked like fighting aliens, demons, or perceived concepts of heroism in a racially divided world, check out Legends of Tomorrow, Wynonna Earp, and HBO’s Watchmen, respectively.