How the A Man Called Horse Sequels Killed the Franchise

Making a sequel to A Man Called Horse was never going to be easy. The 1970 film stunned audiences by taking them into a world they had rarely seen in a Hollywood Western. Six years later, The Return of a Man Called Horse arrived with little left to surprise audiences. Critics, including Roger Ebert, felt the sequel had mistaken repetition for evolution, and audiences largely agreed.

Back then, sequels weren’t the guaranteed cash machines they are today. Audiences expected a sequel to justify its existence, not simply repeat what had worked before. Return never found that justification.

The Western genre wasn’t helping either. By 1976, it was already fading from the top of the box office. Every new release seemed determined to recreate the glory days of John Wayne, even though the genre itself was showing its age. Ironically, Return arrived the same summer as The Shootist, Wayne’s final film. Released just weeks apart, one marked the graceful farewell of a Hollywood legend while the other showed just how tired the traditional Western had become.

The 1970 film earned its reputation largely because of its unforgettable Sun Dance ceremony. Richard Harris’s character willingly endured the ritual, hanging from bone hooks pierced through his chest in one of the most talked-about scenes of its era. It was graphic, controversial, and unlike anything audiences had seen from a leading actor.

The sequel’s biggest mistake was believing the Sun Dance ritual was why audiences loved the original. It wasn’t. People remembered A Man Called Horse because it introduced them to an unfamiliar world and immersed them in a culture Hollywood had rarely explored, even if that portrayal was far from perfect. The ritual was only one part of that journey. The filmmakers saw the scene audiences remembered most and simply did it again, apparently believing people bought tickets for the hooks instead of the story. Unfortunately, viewers could see the strings this time. Shock only works once. What had felt powerful in 1970 now came across as an attempt to recreate headlines rather than tell a better story.

Even if Return had been a stronger film, 1976 was the wrong year to show up swinging. Audiences had no shortage of movies competing for their wallets, including Logan’s Run, The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Omen, and Midway. Against that lineup, Return was asking audiences to pay for something they had already seen six years earlier.

Once the opening act is over, the film settles into a predictable cycle of return, reconciliation, revenge, and rebirth. Critics noted that the pacing slowed to a crawl, while an oversized orchestral score tried to inject importance into scenes that never quite earned it.

Film history has a funny sense of humor. Before Richard Harris signed on, Robert Redford was the first actor offered the role of John Morgan.

Two years later, Redford starred in Jeremiah Johnson, another Western exploring the relationship between a white outsider and Native American culture. More importantly, he invested the success he had earned from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid into purchasing land in Utah, eventually creating the Sundance Institute and, later, the Sundance Film Festival.

The festival takes its name from Redford’s famous outlaw character, yet A Man Called Horse revolves around the Sun Dance ceremony. The two aren’t connected, but it’s one of those strange Hollywood coincidences that makes you stop and smile. Had Redford accepted Horse instead of following the path that led to Jeremiah Johnson and his independent film ambitions, film history might have unfolded very differently.

The 1970 film remains an important, if deeply imperfect, work. It attempted a more serious portrayal of Indigenous culture than many Westerns before it, yet it also reflected the stereotypes and limitations of Hollywood at the time. In many ways, it became an evolutionary stepping stone toward films like Dances with Wolves twenty years later.

The sequel only magnified those weaknesses. Rather than expanding the ideas that made the first film memorable, it repeated them with diminishing returns. Interest faded, and the franchise seemed destined to ride off into the sunset.

In 1983, the studio made one last attempt with Triumphs of a Man Called Horse. Instead of reviving the series, it buried it. Produced on a much smaller budget, the film was dismissed by critics and largely ignored by audiences.

Fans expecting another Richard Harris adventure barely got one. Harris appeared long enough to collect a paycheck before his character was abruptly killed off, making way for a generic story about corrupt prospectors trying to steal gold from Sioux territory by framing the tribe for murder. Gone was the anthropological curiosity that made the first film stand apart. In its place was a formula that felt more like a made-for-TV Western than the conclusion to a once-groundbreaking series.

The title promised Triumphs, but there were very few to be found. The original A Man Called Horse still deserves its place in film history despite its flaws. Its sequels are reminders that not every successful film deserves a franchise.

The original became a landmark because it dared to take audiences somewhere they had never been. The sequels kept trying to take them back to the same place, hoping nobody would notice the journey was gone. Hollywood keeps falling in love with moments instead of understanding why they mattered. It mistakes repetition for nostalgia, but the two are rarely the same thing.

Tony M.

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