The most notorious bounty hunters in pop culture

We start with a real bounty hunter because, well, off the top of our heads, Duane “Dog” Chapman is the only actual bounty hunter we can recall permeating popular culture. During the heyday of reality TV, Dog had his own A&E reality show about his work that ran for a whopping 246 episodes. While he became famous, Chapman is far from an uncontroversial figure. In addition to political and racial statements he has made, he may be the most famous person included in the Wikipedia category “People convicted of murder by Texas.”

Walsh is decidedly less controversial than Chapman, though it helps that he is the protagonist of a fictional film. “Midnight Run” is one of the best action comedies ever made, a tour de force starring Robert De Niro as Walsh and Charles Grodin as Jonathan “The Duke” Mardukas. They criss-cross the United States, but of course Walsh ultimately is looking to do the right thing, even if Duke annoys him to no end.

When Christoph Waltz won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for “Inglourious Basterds,” the general consensus was “Of course, he’s amazing in that movie.” When Waltz then went and won again for another Quentin Tarantino film in “Django Unchained,” the general consensus was “Huh…I guess the Academy voters really love Christoph Waltz.” Now, Waltz is good as King Schultz, a German bounty hunter who takes the titular Django under his wing. The film just isn’t as good as “Basterds,” and Waltz’s role isn’t as compelling. He’s still good as Schultz, and he did win an Oscar playing a bounty hunter, so he certainly belongs here.

Naming the alien bounty hunters “Ug” and “Lee” is precisely the level of joke we expect from “Critters.” That’s not to knock the movie, a pretty enjoyable horror-comedy. The Krites, aka the “Critters,” are felonious aliens who escape prison and head to Earth to wreak havoc. Thus, our two shape-shifting bounty hunters are hired to chase them down, with one of them shifting his appearance to look like musician sensation Johnny Steele.

The thing about bounty hunting in the Wild West is the whole “wanted dead or alive” element. Munny isn’t technically a bounty hunter by trade. When we meet Munny, played by “Unforgiven” director Clint Eastwood, he’s a farmer who spent his younger days committing just about any crime that had money in it, until he reformed his ways for his late wife. It’s the self-declared “Schofield Kid” who is the bounty hunter, and he hires Munny’s gun to help him hunt the bounties on a few outlaws. This Best Picture-winning revisionist Western mines drama from Munny’s descent back into his old ways, as the violence in “Unforgiven” is truly unromanticized.

“Domino” is one of Tony Scott’s forgotten movies, and it was a box-office flop, but it remains remarkable due to the true story it is based on. Domino Harvey, like Duane Chapman, was a real-life bounty hunter (a lifelong drug addict). Unfortunately, Harvey died at the age of 35 from a fentanyl overdose. She was the daughter of model Paulene Stone and famous actor Laurence Harvey. Domino worked as a model, then as a DJ, and then, you know, got into bounty hunting. The novelty of her story led Scott to read an article about her. This led to the two becoming friends which, eventually, led to Keira Knightley playing her in a movie.

The name “Beck” may not ring a bell, but if we were to say, “Dwayne Johnson’s character in ‘The Rundown’” then you’d likely know what we’re talking about. Still early in his acting career, Johnson popped in the action-comedy, even if it was a flop at the box office. Beck dreams of being a chef, but for the time being, he begrudgingly makes ends meet for a bookie, be it collecting on loans or people that need to be brought in. Thus begins a “one last job” story, wherein Beck is sent to Brazil to hunt down his boss's ne'er-do-well son.

If you are fans of C+ pop-lit, there’s a decent chance you are familiar with Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum. At the very least you’ve seen her books next to the Sue Graftons on your mom and/or aunt’s bookshelf. It made sense they would eventually try to turn the Plum series into a film franchise. We got as far as the origin story “One for the Money” wherein Plum sets out on her new career path. With a post-peak Katherine Heigl in the lead role, the movie was both a critical and commercial failure and any future adventures were nixed.

He is still, perhaps, the most-famous fictional bounty hunter of them all. This was true even during the original “Star Wars” trilogy when Boba Fett has only a few lines and then dies a goofy, sight-gag death. Kids of the era just thought his outfit was super cool, and to be fair they weren’t wrong. Eventually, because nothing in the world of “Star Wars” can be left well enough alone, we would get more Boba Fett, and he would even get his own (decent, unremarkable) Disney+ show.

Frankly, the best episodes of “The Book of Boba Fett” were the ones that were basically just episodes of “The Mandalorian.” We have no quibbles about “The Mandalorian,” comfortably the best “Star Wars” show. Din Djarin, aka the Mandalorian, is as successful a bounty hunter as one can employ in the galaxy, but things take a turn for him on one job. Not even a ruthless bounty hunter can resist Baby Yoda, and now the two will have a feature film adventure in 2026.

Back in the glory days of the television Western, “Wanted: Dead or Alive” followed the adventures of Josh Randall. He was a bounty hunter with a heart of gold, often giving the bounties he collected to those in need, and even helping out those he had captured if they had been falsely accused. We’ll overlook the fact this good-natured bounty hunter was a veteran of the Civil War…for the Confederacy. Running for three seasons (and 94 episodes, which was the style at the time), “Wanted: Dead or Alive” is now best remembered as being the show that helped put a young actor named Steve McQueen on the map. Yes, McQueen played Randall.

You may have seen the movie “The Fall Guy,” and you may know it was based on a TV show, but you might be thinking, “Wait, Colt Seavers isn’t a bounty hunter in the movie.” That is true, in the film he hunts no bounties. However, that is actually the driving force of the procedural drama. Yes, Seavers’ main job in “The Fall Guy” is still being a stuntman, but he has a secondary gig as a bounty hunter. Hey, that’s no sillier than a lot of the premises of the era, and it explained why Seavers could do some of the stuff he did chasing down the baddies.

Your idea of what “Deadpool” does may be mostly making so many raunchy jokes that even if only 30 percent of them land, a viewer gets enough laughs to believe they just wanted a “funny” movie. Okay, we’re being a little harsh because the Ryan Reynolds movie trilogy exhausted us by the end, but none of those movies is an unpleasant watch. In all his iterations, though, Deadpool is a mercenary with a mouth. That means doing stuff from helping out superheroes to committing murder for hire to, yes, collecting on bounties.

People in the “G.I. Joe” world do all sorts of stuff. Jinx is a ninja, but what’s known about her beyond that is largely a mystery. She is one of the “G.I. Joe” characters only known by her “code” name. While Jinx’s role has varied from project to project, and she has been in several cartoons and one of the 2010s live-action films, she did work as a bounty hunter at one point, which is probably a good gig to give a try if you’re one of the world’s greatest ninjas.

Deckard’s a bounty hunter with a specific task. Technically, he is a “blade runner,” but that’s only because they wanted to make things all fancy and cyberpunk. Deckard is the protagonist of Ridley Scott’s film “Blade Runner” based on a Philip K. Dick story. His job is to track down replicants, humanoids that, on the surface, are impossible to distinguish from their fully-human counterparts.

“Once Upon a Time” is a needlessly dense show about a bunch of fairy tale characters. There are multiple worlds and parallel lives and also stuff would change as the show went on to keep things interesting. The “chosen one” hero is Emma Swan, secretly the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming. When the show begins, Swan is working on tracking down people who have skipped bail. That’s not the most important element of her character, but it is her job.

To the extent “Jonah Hex” is remembered, it is as a flop. The film, based on a semi-obscure DC character, made $11 million in theaters, which is remarkably poor. Played by Josh Brolin, Jonah Hex is yet another reformed Confederate soldier turned bounty hunter. The plot is pretty silly historical fiction, but Hex is still one of the more notable bounty hunters in film (and also in comic books).

Clint Eastwood became iconic thanks to his work in Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western trilogy. He plays the same poncho-wearing outlaw who speaks infrequently and with a cigarillo clenched in his teeth. The first film in the series, “A Fistful of Dollars,” is based on Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo,” wherein the main character is a ronin with no name. In each movie, Eastwood’s bounty hunter character is called something, be it Joe or Blondie or what have you. Existentially, and culturally, though, he is The Man with No Name.