It’s extremely early in the year, but I imagine it will be tough for another 2025 movie title to come along that’s more metal than “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera.” But if this grungy, pulpy franchise had gone a slightly different way during development, we would have been deprived of that title — and indeed, the “Den of Thieves” movies in their entirety. Instead, we came very close to getting a “Den of Thieves” TV series.
“When I did my research for ‘Den 1’ back in the day, I just came across so many different heists and I got to know the cops that were investigating them, and I just had so much material that we knew that we were going to be building a franchise,” writer/director Christian Gudegast told me in a recent interview. “There was a minute way back in the day where it was going to become a TV series. So I mapped out longer for the arcs of [Gerard Butler], who plays Nick, and then O’Shea [Jackson Jr.], who plays Donnie, their arcs and other heists around the world. So it was kind of planned out from the outset.”
This was the first time I’d heard about the possibility that this could have become a series, but Gudegast said the “brief moment” when it could have happened was the result of industry trends at the time:
“It was written as a feature, and there was just a moment where, at that time, they were taking feature scripts and turning them into television series. That happened with another project I was working on. In other words, I had so much material that it would’ve been easy to do, but then we ended up making the movie and here we are.”
Den of Thieves could have been a show, but is probably better as a film franchise
I enjoyed the grimy sweatiness of the first “Den of Thieves,” and while I didn’t like the sequel quite as much, the follow-up’s climactic heist is a wonderfully executed piece of process-driven cinema, taking us step by step through an elaborate theft of the World Diamond Center. Each heist is, in the writer/director’s words, “a very, very close representation” of one that happened in the real world, and all of that deep research has paid off. For me, the robberies are the highlight of these movies because Gudegast stages them in a way that feels immediate and visceral.
It’s easy to imagine what a “Den of Thieves” TV show might have looked like, with each big heist serving as the culmination of a season of television, but I for one am thankful they ended up as movies. The relationship between Butler’s Big Nick and Jackson’s Donnie is a crucial part of these stories, but so far, it hasn’t hit the magnetic level of something like Johnny Utah and Bodhi in “Point Break” or Brian O’Connor and Dom Toretto in “The Fast and the Furious.” Having many more hours to explore that relationship in a show could have been rewarding, but there’s just as good a chance that the TV format could weigh this whole thing down and surrounded it with the excess and bloat that overtakes so many modern TV shows. I’d much rather have a new movie every few years that has the potential to feel special than another show that overstays its welcome because the algorithm demands it be ten episodes instead of six.
You can hear my full interview with Gudegast on today’s episode of the /Film Daily podcast:
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