Den of Thieves Almost Became a TV Show Instead of a Movie Franchise (Exclusive)

It's very early in the year, but I think it's going to be hard to come up with another 2025 movie title that's more metal than “Den of Thieves 2: Panther.” But if this raunchy, airy franchise had gone a little differently during development, we would have been stripped of the title — and indeed of all the Den of Thieves movies. Instead, we came very close to getting a Den of Thieves series.

“When I was doing research for 'Den 1' back in the day, I just came across so many different robberies and got to know the cops who were investigating them, and I just had so much material that we knew we were going to make a franchise,” he told me in a recent interview. writer/director Christian Gudegast. “It was a minute back in the day when it was supposed to be a TV series. So I looked longer for (Gerard Butler), who plays Nick, and then O'Shea (Jackson Jr.), who plays Donnie, and their arcs and other booty around the world , so it was planned from the beginning.

This was the first I'd heard of the possibility of this being a series, but Gudegast said the “short time” it could happen was a result of industry trends at the time:

“It was written as a feature, and at the time they were shooting feature scripts and turning them into TV series. That happened with another project I was working on. In other words, I had so much material that would have been easy to do, but then we finally made the movie and here we are.”

i enjoyed it the dirty sweat of the first “thieves' pit”, and while I didn't like the sequel that much, the sequel's climactic heist is a wonderfully executed piece of procedural cinema that takes us step-by-step through the elaborate heist of the World Diamond Center. According to the writer/director, each heist is a “very, very close representation” of what happened in the real world, and all that deep research has paid off. I think the heists are the highlight of these films because Gudegast stages them in a way that feels immediate and visceral.

It's easy to imagine what a Den of Thieves TV show would be like, where every big heist serves as the climax of a TV season, but I'm thankful they ended up as movies. The relationship between Butler's Big Nick and Jackson's Donnie is an essential part of these stories, but so far it hasn't reached the magnetic level of Johnny Utah and Bodie in Point Break or Brian O'Connor and Dom Toretto in The Fast and the Furious. Spending more hours exploring this relationship could benefit, but it's just as likely that the TV format could weigh the whole thing down and wrap it up with the excess and bloat that plagues so many modern TV shows. I'd rather see a new movie every few years that has the potential to feel special than another show that isn't expected because the algorithm demands it be ten episodes instead of six.

You can listen to my full interview with Gudegast on today's episode of the /Film Daily podcast:

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