The gritty 2018 heist thriller has found a new streaming home as its sequel's success pushes the franchise toward a third installment set in Africa.
Gerard Butler's cops-and-robbers brawler has a new address. Den of Thieves, the 2018 crime thriller that paired Butler with director Christian Gudegast, joined AMC+'s lineup this October, Collider reported, giving American audiences another way to catch the film without renting it.
At 140 minutes, it's not a quick watch. The plot follows an elite unit of the LA County Sheriff's Department going head to head with the state's most successful bank robbery crew as they plot a heist on the Federal Reserve Bank in downtown LA. Butler plays Nick "Big Nick" O'Brien, a unit leader whose drinking and ethics are both described as loose. He's not the good guy in any clean sense, and that's kind of the point.
The cast around him reads like a who's who of mid-2010s crime cinema. Pablo Schreiber plays Ray Merrimen, O'Shea Jackson Jr. Plays Donnie Wilson, and Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson shows up as Enson Levoux. Maurice Compte, Brian Van Holt, Evan Jones and Dawn Olivieri round out a cast that, on paper, looks built for exactly this kind of LA-set, Heat-adjacent sprawl.
And critics weren't shy about pointing that out. Den of Thieves sits at 42% on Rotten Tomatoes from 135 reviews, per Collider, with several notices flagging how closely it borrows from Michael Mann's playbook. Audiences disagreed, at least a little. The Popcornmeter score sits at 64%, a solid 22-point gap that tells you something about who this movie was actually made for.
A franchise built on word of mouth
The box office wasn't a blowout either. Den of Thieves made $44.9 million domestically and roughly $80 million worldwide during its theatrical run, modest numbers by studio action standards. But the film kept finding viewers long after it left theatres, building the kind of cult following that studios can't always engineer on purpose.
That staying power is why Butler, Jackson Jr. And Gudegast came back for a sequel, Den of Thieves 2: Pantera. And according to Collider, the franchise isn't stopping there. A third film is reportedly in the works, one that would shift the action to Africa, a geographic jump that would be the biggest swing this series has taken yet.
None of that is confirmed beyond the trade reporting, and there's no word yet on casting, a director, or a timeline for the third movie. What is confirmed is that the original is easy to find again, sitting on a streaming platform eight years after it first hit theatres and quietly built the audience that justified a sequel in the first place.
Whether AMC+ becomes the film's long-term home or just a temporary stop remains to be seen. For now, anyone curious about the movie that kicked off this franchise doesn't have to hunt for it.
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