It's extremely early in the year, but I imagine it'll be hard to come up with another 2025 movie title that's more metal than Den of Thieves 2: Pantera. But if this goofy, mushy franchise had taken a slightly different path during development, we would have been robbed of that title — and indeed, the Day of Thieves films as a whole. Instead, we came very close to getting a Day of Thieves TV series.

"When I did my research for 'Day 1' back in the day, I came across so many different robberies and met the officers who were investigating them, and I had so much material that we knew we were going to have. to build a franchise,” writer/director Christian Gudegast told me in a recent interview. “There was a minute back in the day when it was going to be a TV series. So I mapped out longer 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 planned from the beginning.

This was the first I'd heard of the possibility of this becoming a series, but Gudegast said the "brief moment" when it could happen was due to industry trends at the time:

"It was written as a play, and there was just a point where, at the time, they were taking screenplays 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 have been easy to do, but then we shot the movie and here we are."

I enjoyed it the dark sweat of the first "Day of Thieves", and while I didn't like the sequel as much, the climax of the subsequent heist is a beautifully executed process-driven cinematic that takes 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 what happened in the real world, and all that deep research paid off. For me, 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 the Day of the Thieves TV show might have been like, with each major heist serving as the climax of the television season, but I'm thankful they ended up as movies. The relationship between Butler's Big Nick and Jackson's Donnie is a key part of these stories, but so far it hasn't reached the magnetic level of something like Johnny Utah and Bodie 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 might be rewarding, but there's just as good a chance that the television format will weigh the whole thing down and surround it with excess and bloat that exceeds so much modern TV. series. I'd 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 calls for ten episodes instead of six.

You can hear my full interview with Gudegast on today's podcast / Film Daily episode:

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