Den of Thieves 2: Pantera writer-director Christian Gudegast has the patience of a saint.
2018’s Den of Thieves, starring Gerard Butler, O’Shea Jackson Jr. and Pablo Schreiber, took 15 years to reach the big screen, overcoming the bankruptcy of Relatively Media and various other obstacles along the way. The would-be franchise launcher, despite mixed reviews, then became a modest box office success, grossing over $80 million against a $30 million budget. However, the action-heist film surged in popularity by way of the home market and a particularly vocal social media fanbase. Gudegast is beyond grateful for that audience, but he insists that the sequel was already in motion before their added embrace.
Development on Den of Thieves 2 began in February 2018, as Gudegast, much like filmmakers Taylor Sheridan and Jeremy Saulnier, went to great lengths to research real-life laws, loopholes and incidents to inform his fictional narrative. And just as production was about to get going in 2020, the pandemic set them back, as did Butler’s physical complications coming out of the shutdown. Then, in February 2022, they again had to postpone filming due to their Croatia/Serbia locations being affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A move to France then followed, but it proved to be financially prohibitive, before finally settling on Tenerife, Spain.
“We had many, many hurdles, production-wise, and that was really the challenge. Comparatively, the script was a walk in the park compared to the production realities,” Gudegast tells The Hollywood Reporter.
Consequently, Den of Thieves 2 is now in theaters nearly seven years to the day that the original film was released. The story jumps ahead two years, as Butler’s “Big Nick” is still tracking Donnie’s (Jackson) criminal thievery overseas. But then Gudegast throws a curveball by having Big Nick “go gangster” for his own chance to strike it rich. Together, the unlikely duo plan to rob the World Diamond Center in Nice, France — a story point that Gudegast would’ve preferred to keep under wraps.
“The trailers are cut by the studio, and I, personally, am a fan of teaser trailers that don’t give away plot details. But conventional wisdom is that it helps market a film and sell it,” Gudegast admits. “So that’s left to the marketing minds, and you have to trust that they know what they’re doing.”
If all goes well for Gudegast’s sequel, he’s already done the legwork to ensure that a threequel happens much sooner than his two existing installments.
“[A threequel is] already pitched. It’s already done. We’re ready to go,” Gudegast says. “We’re feeling very good about it.”
Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Gudegast also discusses why the film doesn’t pick up where Den of Thieves left off in London, as well as the absence of Donnie’s friend, Mack.
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You worked with Gerard Butler as a co-writer on London Has Fallen (2016). Did you pitch him the long-gestating Den of Thieves at some point in that process?
He read it prior to that. Den of Thieves was almost made before London Has Fallen, but then Relativity Media went bankrupt. So that slowed the process for a couple of years, and it was during that time that London was made. So he read Den prior to London, and that’s when we became aware of each other. I then worked on London with him, and after that, we shot Den once it was out of the bankruptcy situation and at a different studio.
Den of Thieves did well in theaters, but it really thrived through word of mouth once it was made available at home. It’s one of those films that’s endlessly rewatchable. Did that post-theatrical audience make all the difference in landing a sequel?
It certainly didn’t hurt. That’s for sure. We always had plans for sequels, but Den of Thieves had to perform to a degree, of course.
Thus, when you included the London coda in the first film, you’d already charted a course?
Yeah, I do loads and loads of research, and when I was researching Den, I came across so much information and detail about so many potential heists. We wanted to jam it all into the script, but we just didn’t have enough real estate. There was not enough room in the script, but we knew then that we had many more stories to tell in that world. So when we built out Den, I knew that we were going to go on to Den 2 and on from there. The idea was to eventually examine major heists all over the world and bring these franchise characters from heist to heist. So it was built out by design from the beginning.
You made the first film under the radar somewhat, but with the second film, you had eyes and expectations on you. So how challenging was the development of the sequel script?
The script really wasn’t difficult; it was a joy. But it did take a long time because I had to go to various parts of the world to research it all. The difficulty was not the script process, but production. We were ramping up to start, but then Covid hit. We were just about to ramp up again after coming out of Covid, but then we had a bad injury to one of our leads [Gerard Butler]. So that was another nine or ten months, and then we were probably going to go shoot it in Croatia and Serbia. But then the war with Ukraine hit, and we had to move out of that zone because everyone from the Ukraine went down to where we were going to shoot it. There were literally no hotels or Airbnbs available to house the crew. Then, we went to France, but the exchange rate changed and the tax credit in France didn’t work. Ultimately, we ended up in Tenerife. So we had many, many hurdles, production-wise, and that was really the challenge. Comparatively, the script was a walk in the park compared to the production realities. [Writer’s Note: Butler has since revealed that he shot Den of Thieves 2 with a “freshly torn” ACL. He’d already been through a series of surgeries that resulted from a motorcycle accident in 2017.]
If you knew you were guaranteed to have a sequel, is there anything you would’ve done differently in the first film to make your life easier on the second one?
No, not really. You just try to make them all unique unto themselves.
Seven years have passed between movies, and two fictional years have passed between the two stories. Is the time gap between the two movies the reason why you didn’t pick up immediately where you left off in London?
There is a link. It’s a very subtle detail. The package that Donny steals at the beginning from the airplane is destined for the London Diamond Exchange. It’s a small detail that probably not many people will pick up on. The scene was initially going to be in London, but because of the realities of production, we couldn’t get something to match the London location. So we moved it to the other reality of what are called the Africa flights, which is Antwerp. Gone are the days of shooting movies where they’re set. You now shoot in these tax havens. So that was all a function of having to adjust the script to match where we actually made the movie.
Donnie’s friend, Mack (Cooper Andrews), is missing from the sequel. Did you ever figure out what happened between them?
He was written into this script, but again, because of certain realities of shooting it, we had to lose the majority of it. There’s a push-pull between the script and where you’re actually going to shoot something. It dictates the production, and it happens all the time. So there was a lot of rewriting and polishing and adjusting per the reality of our shooting schedule and where we were shooting it.
The marketing of the film revealed that Nick (Butler) teams up with Donnie (Jackson Jr.). “The cop goes gangster.” Were you content with that choice at the time? Or did you prefer to save that turn for the actual viewing experience?
That’s a big question. The trailers are cut by the studio, and I, personally, am a fan of teaser trailers that don’t give away plot details. But conventional wisdom is that it helps market a film and sell it. So that’s left to the marketing minds, and you have to trust that they know what they’re doing. So my personal taste probably doesn’t represent the masses in this sense, but I prefer more teaser trailers that tell less of the plot.
Den of Thieves’ Federal Reserve heist revolved around stealing unfit currency that’s set to be destroyed, and that’s apparently a real process that the Fed uses.
It is.
Were you able to find an authentic detail on that level for Den of Thieves 2’s Diamond Center heist?
Everything you saw in the film was based on authentic details. I went to Europe and spent months over there with the heads of the diamond police. They were actually on our set the whole time, and everything in the film is based on actual heists. Every detail. So we’d pick and choose from a few different heists. The lead investigators and I spoke to people on the criminal side and the law enforcement side. We had thieves there as well. So every detail was very, very carefully thought through and planned out based on real-life heists.
For instance, there were heists where the thieves knew the exact timing of the CCTV coverage, the security monitor coverage, of an area. They literally knew when it would go dark so they could perfectly move through the blind spots. It took a long, long time to figure out the timing, and they did it accurately. When we saw the investigation and the result of what they’re able to do, it was just jaw dropping.
You mentioned rewriting based on the realities of production. How much did location scouting change Den 2’s heists as written on the page?
The heists didn’t change that much. It was so important to get them right as written on the page, and the page dictated where we ended up shooting them. But every movie has these issues: the production calendar, how many days you have to shoot it, where it’s going to be shot, et cetera. We shot everything almost exclusively on practical locations, and unless you’re building sets from the ground up, you have to go out into the world and find things that match what you wrote.
When I research and write, I go to the actual locations where these [similar heists] took place. I photograph them, and I put together a lookbook. Then, at the beginning of production, I’ll show the lookbook to the location managers and say, “This scene needs to look just like this.” Then they go out and try to find it. So they knew exactly what to look for, and for the two big heists we have in this film, we were able to match them pretty damn close.
There’s a really cool car chase involving a Porsche. Apparently, Porsche was set to destroy a handful of their Taycan models, much like the currency in the first movie.
(Laughs.) Right.
But you were able to scoop them up first?
Yeah, they had five Porsche Taycans that were no longer street legal, and they couldn’t actually sell them or anything. The engineering is so laborious that they were just going to scrap them. I don’t know why exactly. But we were able to get our hands on them. So Porsche became our partners, and we had to completely re-engineer these five cars for the way we wanted to shoot that shootout. We needed the driver to be in a pod on the roof of the car, and it’s never been done with an electric car before. It’s been done with gas-powered cars, but not electric. So they had to rewire all the controls of the car to the roof so that we could have the driver driving on it. The camera could then be inside the car, and we could be very loose and really close to the action.
The roads were very, very dangerous, and we couldn’t have the actor perform and drive at the same time. It was too dangerous to shoot it that way. So we had to use a stunt driver, and normally, if the stunt driver is driving the actual car, you can’t have a camera inside the car and you can only shoot one actor at a time. But we wanted to have the camera inside the car with two or three actors, and in order to do that, the driver had to be on the roof. So Porsche was incredible, and it took months and months and months to pull off. Their head engineers from Germany and North America were on set, and it was crazy to watch. We were only able to shoot it the way we did because they were able to pull it off.
Were Nick and Donnie’s backstories also based on research and real accounts?
Yes, those monologues were based on research I did for Den, and then I brought those stories into Den 2. There was just no place for them in Den, but I found a place in Den 2.
Heist movies are often compared to filmmaking since both require a team of specialists to pull off the impossible. Was there a particular day where you felt like you’d completed your own successful heist?
Oh God, many. We had a healthy shooting schedule, but we could have used another 10 to 15 days. During the final heist, in the World Diamond Center’s elevator shaft and into the vault, boy, we had some challenges there. We also had one with the car shootout. Locations, here and there, were an issue. We had a three-and-a-half-kilometer-long tunnel to film that scene in, which would basically give us about 50 to 60 seconds of runtime as we were filming the scene. And then we lost that location four days before we were going to shoot it. So we had to scramble, and the replacement tunnel that we found had only seven seconds of runway. So it was action, cut, action, cut, and just as an actor would get into the scene, we’d have to cut because we would come out of the tunnel. So that was really challenging.
This town loves trilogies, so could you pitch a threequel tomorrow if you had to?
It’s already pitched. It’s already done. We’re ready to go.
Should I knock on wood?
We’re feeling very good about it. But, sure, knock on wood. It doesn’t hurt.
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Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is now playing in movie theaters.
English (US) ·