It’s extremely early in the year, but I imagine it’ll be hard to see another more metal 2025 movie title pop up than “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera.” But if this dirty, pulpy franchise had taken a slightly different path during development, we would have been deprived of this title – and of course the “Den of Thieves” films in their entirety. Instead, we came very close to getting a “Den of Thieves” TV series.

“When I was doing my research for ‘Den 1,’ back then, I came across so many different heists and got to know the cops who were investigating them, and I had so much material that we knew we were going to build a franchise,” writer/director Christian Gudegast told me in a recent interview. “A minute ago, this was going to become a TV series. So I planned out the arcs of [Gerard Butler]who plays Nick, then O’Shea [Jackson Jr.]who plays Donnie, their arcs and other heists around the world. So it was kind of planned from the start. »

This was the first time I had heard of the possibility that it could have become a series, but Gudegast said the “brief moment” when it could have happened was the result of industry trends toward era :

“It was written as a feature film, and there was just a point where, at that point, they were taking feature scripts and turning them into TV series. That happened with another project on Which I was working on. In other words, I had so much material to do that it would have been easy to do, but then we ended up making the movie and here we are.

I appreciated the filthy sweat of the first “Den of Thieves”, and while I didn’t like the sequel as much, the sequel’s climactic heist is a wonderfully executed, process-driven piece of cinema, taking us step by step through an elaborate heist of the World Diamond Center. Each heist is, in the writer/director’s words, “a very, very close representation” of the one that happened in the real world, and all that extensive research has paid off. For me, the flights are the highlight of these films because Gudegast depicts them in an immediate and visceral way.

It’s easy to imagine what a “Den of Thieves” TV show might have been like, with each big heist being the climax of a TV season, but I, for one, am grateful that 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 reached the magnetic level of something like Johnny Utah and Bodhi in “Point Break” or Brian O’Connor and Dom Toretto in ‘Fast and Furious’. Having many more hours to explore this relationship in one show could have been rewarding, but there’s just as good a chance that the TV format will weigh it all down and surround it with the excess and bloat that overwhelms 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 series that overstays its welcome because the algorithm demands it be ten episodes instead of six.

You can hear my full interview with Gudegast in today’s episode of the /Film Daily podcast:

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