Idris Elba to star in musically stylish revenge drama produced by JAY-Z for Netflix

According to Variety, Idris Elba is set to play the villain in The Harder They Fall, a movie produced by JAY-Z and directed by musician Jeymes Samuel—a.k.a. “The Bullitts”—who previously directed the Western short They Die By Dawn (starring Erykah Badu, Jesse Williams, Rosario Dawson, and Michael K. Williams, and, apparently, exclusively streaming on Tidal). Variety says the movie is going to take a “similar approach” to The Great Gatsby in terms of “incorporating music,” which presumably means it’s going to have a playfully anachronistic hip-hop-inspired soundtrack. (Samuel worked with JAY-Z on the aforementioned Gatsby soundtrack, so this isn’t coming out of nowhere, but it’ll be interesting to see how something like that works without the… endearingly audacious directing of Baz Luhrmann.)

Anyway, The Harder They Fall is going to star Jonathan Majors as an outlaw who discovers that the man who decides to reunite with his gang for some old-fashioned vengeance after finding out that the man who killed his parents (Elba) is being released from prison.