“ Den of Thieves 2: Pantera ” features the world’s first electric car chase. When writer and director Christian Gudegast was thinking about the film’s sequel, he knew he needed to raise the stakes, and what better way to do that than with an all-action, shoot-out car chase? And it needed to feel fast and real.

W riter/director Christian Gudegast’s Den Of Thieves is not a film that particularly appealed to my personal sensibilities, but it did allow me to go into the sequel with an ope

It’s an odd choice to do a sequel to the 2018 heist movie “Den of Thieves” in 2025. The first film made less than $50 million at the domestic box

In this franchise, O’Shea Jackson Jr. and Gerard Butler band together and blur the lines between the actions of an anti-hero and a real villain.

The dogged cop and wily thief butt heads again in Christian Gudegast's follow-up to his 2018 heist thriller. Imagine the iconic diner sit-down scene between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Michael Mann’s Heat stretched out to feature length and you’ll get some idea of Den of Thieves 2: Pantera.

Pantera debuts in the US theaters today. Review scores for the sequel have now started to come in and have surpassed those of the original, with the movie getting strong ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.

I wasn’t actively writing about movies when Den of Thieves came out in 2018, so it was one I opted to skip at the time. However, I became aware that a bit of a cult following started to grow around the Gerard Butler heist movie,

Lionsgate's heist thriller sequel, starring Gerard Butler and O'Shea Jackson Jr., opens at No. 1 despite slow January weekend and LA theater closures.

Christian Gudegast's action sequel occasionally works, but gets too caught up in cliche criminal caper tropes.

Owen Gleiberman of Variety calls Den of Thieves 2: Pantera a satisfying impersonation of a high-end crime film, saying that Gerard Butler is good enough to lift “a piece of pulp so it almost seems like a real movie.” The critic continues:

O’Shea Jackson Jr. returns as Donnie, the once-unassuming heist driver, who is now front and center with box office star Gerard Butler for the Den of Thieves sequel.

That’s pacing a touch ahead of the first “Den of Thieves,” which STX opened in January 2018 to a $5.6 million opening day and $15.2 million three-day total. It’s also going to be Lionsgate’s first opening on top of the box office since “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” bowed in November 2023.