(Credits: Far Out / Lionsgate)

Seven years can be an eternity in Hollywood, especially for the sequel to a movie that surprised many by debuting at the top of the box office in the United States. However, absence clearly made the heart grow fonder, with writer and director Christian Gudegast’s Den of Thieves 2: Pantera replicating the success of its predecessor by opening at number one when it was released in America this past January.

The follow-up to the 2018 original sees Gerard Butler’s ‘Big Nick’ O’Brien heading off to Europe to continue his pursuit of O’Shea Jackson Jr’s Donnie Wilson, and the adversaries are forced to form a tenuous alliance to pull off an ambitious diamond heist despite each man harbouring ulterior motives and a mutual distrust for the other.

Audiences in the United Kingdom have had to wait even longer for Den of Thieves 2, which premieres on Prime Video on April 25th. The lengthy wait between the films was largely due to circumstances outside of Gudegast’s control, but the filmmaker was thrilled to see that the nascent franchise hadn’t lost any of its appeal.

“You do your best and let the chips fall where they may,” he said of the seven-year gap. “I mean, all you can do is make the best movie you can. You never know, especially these days, the box office is so strange with streaming and everything. It’s a new world in that sense: do you go to the theatre or not? How long are you in the theatre? When people go to the theatre, how quickly do you go to streaming? All those questions are difficult to figure out; that math. But then, when you do open, it feels great.”

Gudegast doesn’t plan on wasting any time on Den of Thieves 3, though, which was officially announced less than three weeks after Pantera and has its eyes set on a 2026 shoot. Having bided his time with the first two chapters, his approach hasn’t been affected by any potential hurdles that may arise.

“My process is the same,” he offered. “I’ve already done a lot of the work for Den 3, and I do tonnes of research. And in my research of Den 1 and then 2, I met all these people involved in that world, both on the criminal side and the law enforcement side. So I know long ahead of time where I want to go with everything. I just do tonnes of research, and I go to the worlds where the movie will be set and take place, so it’s the same, really.”

The director’s research helps set Den of Thieves apart from other heist movies. The set pieces are as slick and stylish as anyone would expect from a Hollywood action thriller, but they’re also designed to be entirely plausible and realistic. Unsurprisingly, it takes a lot of time to iron out those beats in terms of planning and logistics when Gudegast is seeking the sweet spot between blockbuster sheen and realism.

“100%, I do an insane amount of research,” he agreed. “Everything in Den 2 is real. All the technology and the way they did it is an amalgamation of a few different heists. But again, I had the lead investigators, the heads of the diamond police [Guardia di Finanza, who investigate robberies and smuggling in Italy], were there with me the whole time. I had the thieves involved with me there the whole time; we’re all working together to make sure everything is totally authentic.”

With two movies in the can and at least one more on the way, Den of Thieves is a rarity in modern Hollywood: an original action franchise that isn’t based on a pre-existing property. Despite the seven-year wait for the sequel, Gudegast concurs that it may have been beneficial in a way after the opener kept growing its audience on digital and streaming to create an even bigger audience who wanted more.

“I guess it happened for a reason,” he mused. “And the time is frustrating. You know, from Covid to actors injuring their knees, to the war in Russia. We were going to shoot in Serbia, and all the refugees came to Belgrade, and we couldn’t house the crew, and then the strike. It was like one thing after the other, but at the end of the day, I guess you’re right that the fanbase grew, and here we are off to Den 3.”

These days, sequels to hit movies almost always end up going bigger for the sake of it. However, on the budgetary scale, the leap from Den of Thieves to Pantera wasn’t huge, and it was Gudegast’s intention to avoid the usual pitfalls of going bigger simply because it’s a sequel while still increasing the scope, scale, and spectacle by evolving the story away from the Los Angeles-set original to a globetrotting adventure.

“My goal isn’t to really go bigger,” he stated. “It’s just to move onto a different heist in a different part of the world. The third, we’re going to go to a different continent. It’s going to become a little geopolitical. It’s going to look completely different. We’re going to introduce new criminal underworlds and new groups, and again, all based on actual heists that I’ve researched and based on people that I’ve met.”

“That’s really it,” he continued. “And then, obviously, you try to keep the budgets to a certain level to make it financially feasible. I’m just always trying to find something, a new wrinkle to the genre, a new way to tell the story, introduce new characters, see them in different worlds, and their relationships evolve. It’s just about the evolution of the characters in the ever-expanding world of Den.”

One constant has been Butler’s ‘Big Nick’, and the actor has been working closely with Gudegast for a number of years. Outside of Den of Thieves, the latter co-wrote London Has Fallen and was an executive producer on Plane. Funnily enough, having a leading man who’s also a friend and producer there during every step of the process, from conception to post-production, is a plus.

“It makes all the difference in the world,” the director admitted. “We know each other very well. We trust each other. We have a great working relationship. I mean, phenomenal. When you’re writing the script, knowing which actor is going to play the role is huge. Totally different experience. Much healthier, much better. You know their voice, and it just makes the process that much more enjoyable.”

It’s a heist movie at its core, but with Gudegast detailing the extensive research he puts in, how does he crack the story? Does he begin with a heist and write the narrative around it, or vice versa? Is it somewhere in the middle, or maybe even none of the above?

“In the middle,” he clarified. “I know what I want to do with the characters and what’s happening in their lives, and then what’s happening in their dynamic together, and then I know the few different criminal activities that I’m piecing together, linking together, that they’re going to become involved in, and then you sort of weave the two right together.”

Den of Thieves 2, and its predecessor, for that matter, are definitely heightened films without being particularly far-fetched ones. For talking’s sake, let’s say they’re more John Frankenheimer’s Ronin than Fast & Furious. And yet, when there are movie stars, car chases, heists, and cross-continental cat-and-mouse games involved, finding the right tonal balance is key.

“The done is just the tone that I love, you know?” Gudegast elaborated before making an important distinction. “People talk about Fast & Furious a lot. God bless Fast & Furious, and I understand, but I’ve actually seen ten minutes of the first one; that’s it. I’ve never seen any of them otherwise.” That said, Frankenheimer’s 1998 thriller is an entirely different case.

“Ronin was a big influence,” the director went on. “I worked with Frankenheimer towards the end of his career and life, and had the real honour of working with him. He’s sort of a mentor of mine, a wonderful man; really sad when he passed away. Ronin was a huge influence on me, and so I definitely lean into the Frankenheimer, Michael Mann world, more than, again, Fast & Furious. Great, but that’s not at all the tone we’re going for with these. We’re going for authenticity.”

The Den of Thieves franchise has moved from LA to mainland Europe, and Gudegast isn’t done yet. Should his plans for the future pan out, the action will relocate to Africa, Brazil, and Southeast Asia for the third, fourth, and fifth films, but not necessarily in that order.

“I already have the heists, and I’ve already been to these places, done the research, and know exactly where we’re going,” he proclaimed. “It’s all done. It’s all done ahead of time. I do everything way ahead of time. I go to places, meet people, do research, spend a lot of time in the world, collect my advisors and people I trust who let me into the world, and get to know them very well, and build it from there.”

Hypothetically speaking, if there were any actor from the ‘Golden Age’ of crime thrillers that Gudgegast would love to draft into a Den of Thieves movie, there’s only one name at the top of the wish list, and it makes perfect sense based on their back catalogue of hard-boiled classics.

“De Niro, because he’s just the coolest actor of all time,” came the unequivocal reply. “I mean, he just is. He’s just the coolest motherfucker ever from that era. He’s the best; definitely one that the fans would like to see anyway.” Steve McQueen came in a close second, but for Gudegast, nobody beats the ice-cool Heat, Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, and, of course, Ronin icon.

The two Den of Thieves movies are his only features as a director so far, and the third entry is shaping up to be next, but Gudegast also has an ambitious passion project that he’s been working on for over a decade that’s about as far away from his grounded and gritty heist flicks as it’s possible to get. If he could wake up tomorrow and direct anything, he knows exactly what it would be.

“That would be my Viking epic that I’ll be doing sometime in the next few years, called Berserker,” he said. “That is my Braveheart meets Apocalypto meets Gladiator. No question. I researched for ten years. It’s about the Vikings around 1000 AD, who went from Scandinavia to Constantinople, where they became what’s called the Varangian Guard. It’s just about that whole time and that era and the beginning of the Rus, which became the Russians. It’s a historical fiction epic.”

Den of Thieves 3 might be the priority, seeing as it’s already gotten the green light, but knowing how much research he puts into his projects, Gudegast’s Berserker sounds like a change of pace that’ll slice and dice its way to the screen with plenty of action without skimping on the accuracy.