Mario Van Peebles returns with western

Mario Van Peebles is set to direct and star in Outlaw Posse. He wrote the script. Peebles has teamed with Emmy-winning filmmaker Kip Konwiser and Christopher Miller’s The Money Pool on the cowboy drama. The film is in preproduction and Van Peebles has begun casting leads for early next year, with Konwiser and Miller producing.

Outlaw Posse is set against the rolling hills and the lawless towns of the American wild west in the late 1800s. Van Peebles plays Chief, leader of a posse of black cowboys in search of truth & justice. Van Peebles is no stranger to the western world. He starred in and directed the 1993 western Posse.

Posse is centered on the lives of Black people—townspeople, cowboys, even sheriffs—in the nineteenth-century West. It’s an adventure that’s made taut by a steadfast and passionate sense of principle, provided as much by the filmmaker as by the film’s protagonists, not least because Van Peebles also stars—as Jesse Lee, an involuntary recruit in the Spanish-American War. The action begins in Cuba, in 1898, where Jesse, a convict sentenced to lifetime military service, is the leader of a mostly Black regiment that’s sent on a suicide mission by the racist Colonel Graham (Billy Zane). Jesse leads a group of three Black soldiers and one white soldier in a revolt against the Colonel, and they sneak back to the United States, a stolen chest of gold coins in tow, via the comedic conceit of taking the place of corpses. Reaching New Orleans—and joined there by a gambler called Father Time (Big Daddy Kane).+