Name: How to Rob a Bank
Director: David Leitch
Genre: Action, Crime, Thriller
Released: 2026-11-13T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 122 min
Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Zoë Kravitz, Anna Sawai, Rhenzy Feliz, Pete Davidson

How to Rob a Bank, the new thriller from David Leitch, breaks the first rule of the heist movie. The genre usually runs on what it keeps from you: the crew assembles, the plan is half explained, and the real move stays hidden until the vault is already open. Leitch’s robbers, led by Nicholas Hoult behind a wolf mask, do the opposite. They film their own jobs and post them for an audience that grows with every bank they hit.

That one decision carries the whole film as Amazon MGM Studios has sold it. The official synopsis describes a crew of social media-savvy robbers whose viral fame puts them in the sights of a veteran FBI agent and a brilliant software engineer, played by John C. Reilly and Zoë Kravitz. Even the title reads like the name of a video. A robbery staged as content has to make sense to the people watching it, so the film gives up the genre’s favourite weapon, surprise, before the first job begins.

Performers on one side, close readers on the other

The casting maps that idea. Hoult plays Ryan, the ringleader, with Anna Sawai, Rhenzy Feliz and Pete Davidson completing the crew; Davidson’s character is Vince. These thieves are performers before they are professionals. In the footage Amazon MGM showed exhibitors at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, as reported by the Spanish outlet Decine21, the gang had already pulled 15 bank robberies and gathered 31 million followers, Hoult in the wolf mask and the others in animal masks of their own. Hoult comes to the role straight from playing Lex Luthor in Superman, another man who mistakes an audience for power.

Across from them, Reilly’s Agent West is the veteran and Kravitz’s Reagan Gardner is the engineer he brings in; Inverse, writing about the first trailer, called her a skilled hacker tapped by a no-nonsense agent. That pairing is the film’s second structural choice. If the robbers are broadcasting, the chase becomes a matter of reading the broadcast, and the hunters turn into the most attentive viewers the crew has. Hoult and Kravitz have worked together before, in X-Men: First Class and Mad Max: Fury Road. Here they sit on opposite sides of the feed. Christian Slater plays Walton, the manager whose bank becomes the gang’s main target.

Leitch trades the stunt showcase for a satire of the feed

Leitch came up through stunt work, co-directed the first John Wick without credit and then built his own run of action films: Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, Hobbs & Shaw, Bullet Train, The Fall Guy. Those films sold choreography first. Empire, reacting to the first trailer, listed POV shots inside the bank job, two-footed dropkicks and “a primo slice of anti-capitalist sentiment.” Decine21’s account of the CinemaCon presentation has Leitch describing the project as a kind of modern Robin Hood story, ordinary people taking on a system marked by corruption and greed. The tagline, “Who’s robbing who?”, points the same way.

The craft question is how the film photographs a robbery made for phones. A test-screening reaction published by The InSneider and relayed by World of Reel said the film is partly shot in a DIY TikTok, YouTube and Instagram style, especially the robbery scenes. If that describes the finished cut, the heist sequences belong to the crew as much as to Leitch, and the film’s point of view drifts toward the people it is supposed to be judging.

What the trailers cannot settle

Nothing released so far proves the structure holds over two hours. The broadcast premise solves the genre’s exposition problem, because the crew explains itself to its followers, but it also threatens the suspense: a robbery planned for an audience can only surprise the audience inside the film. Inverse noted that Leitch and screenwriter Mark Bianculli are keeping Ryan’s personal score for later, and that hidden motive may be the only real secret left. The same critic argued that Leitch’s films have tended to work better as stunt showcases than as stories, and a clever premise does not erase that record on its own.

The anti-bank posture needs the same caution. The second trailer closes with Ryan telling his viewers, “And remember, kids. Do try this at home,” and the studio’s YouTube channel also carries a Fortnite announcement trailer for the film. A blockbuster about influencers is selling itself through the platforms its characters live on, and whether the film notices that contradiction or simply enjoys it is something no trailer can show. Rotten Tomatoes listed no critic reviews this week, days before the first openings.

Who made it, and when it opens

Bianculli developed the screenplay for several years with Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment before Leitch’s 87North Productions and Amazon MGM Studios joined. Leitch produces with Grazer, Jeb Brody, Allan Mandelbaum and Kelly McCormick, with Bianculli and Ben Ormand as executive producers. Tati Gabrielle also appears, as Skyler. Jonathan Sela shot the film in Pittsburgh, where production began in June 2025, and Dominic Lewis wrote the score. Despite the shared title, it has no connection to the Netflix documentary about the Seattle bank robber Scott Scurlock.

Two members of the masked crew, in animal masks, crouch in the back of a van outside a bank in How to Rob a Bank (2026) — The masked crew in *How to Rob a Bank* (2026)

The R-rated film was first dated for Labor Day weekend before Amazon MGM moved it to the fall. It opens in US theaters on November 13, 2026, and Sony Pictures handles the release in markets such as the UK and Germany. TMDB lists a running time of 122 minutes.

Ryan’s last line in the trailer asks his followers to copy him. The film is asking something harder of its own audience: to buy a ticket for a crew that has already shown them everything, on the promise that the one thing still hidden, why Ryan started, is worth the price.