Den of Thieves almost became a TV show instead of a movie series (exclusive)

It’s very early in the year, but I imagine it’ll be hard to come up with another 2025 movie title that’s more metal than that. “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” But if this filthy, disgusting franchise had gone a slightly different route during development, we would have been deprived of this title – and, in fact, the entire “Den of Thieves” movies. Instead, we came very close to having a “Den of Thieves” TV series.

“When I did my research for Den 1 that day, I came across so many different robberies 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. A recent interview: “There was a minute in the day when it was going to be a TV series. So I planned longer arcs for (Gerard Butler), who plays Nick, and then O’Shea (Jackson Jr.), who plays Donnie and their arcs and other heists around the world, so it was planned from the beginning.

This was the first I’d heard of this potentially becoming a series, but Gudegast said the “brief moment” that it could have happened was a result of industry trends at the time:

“It was written as a feature film, and there was a moment where, at the time, they were taking long scripts and turning them into TV series. It happened with another project I was working on. In other words, I had a lot of material that was easy to do, but after So we ended up making the movie and here we are.”

I enjoyed it The filthy sweat of the first “den of thieves”, And while I didn’t like Part 2 as much, Part 2’s climactic heist is a wonderfully executed, ops-based 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 one that happened in the real world, and all that deep research has 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 a “Den of Thieves” TV show might look like, where every major heist is the culmination of a TV season, but I’m personally grateful that it ended up being made into movies. The relationship between the great Nick Butler and Donnie Jackson is an important part of these stories, but so far it hasn’t reached the magnetic level of something like Johnny Utah and Buddy in “Point Break” or Brian O’Connor and Dom Toretto in The Fast and the Furious. Spending more hours exploring that relationship in a show would have been rewarding, but there’s also a good chance the TV format would weigh the whole thing down and surround it with the excess and bloat that overtakes many modern TV shows. 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 requires it to 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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