Lionsgate looks to celebrate this weekend with their first No. 1 opening since November 2023’s The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes with Den of Thieves 2: Pantera which is currently seeing a $14M+ opening with room for upside.

Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr. are back in “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera,” four years after their first action-packed heist thriller became a hit. The Lionsgate movie has made $1.35 million in Thursday previews so far at the box office.

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,

Butler's brusque, beady-eyed, scowling-hulk charisma has aged well. A quick-fire actor in a caveman's body, he has the ability to lift a piece of pulp so that it almost seems like a real movie.

Christian Gudegast’s juiced-up “Heat” homage “Den of Thieves” has become a bit of a cult hit in the seven years since it was released, due in large part to co-star Gerard Butler’s boisterously haggard performance as “Big Nick” O’Brien,

It wasn’t long after Den of Thieves hit theaters in 2018 that writer/director Christian Gudegast began working on a sequel to the heist movie. Now, seven years later, Big Nick is finally back, hitting the 2025 movie calendar with Den of Thieves 2: Pantera.