Prime Video‘s new Mona Lisa heist film was already shooting when real thieves broke into the Louvre. Masterplan, a family heist comedy from Gaumont and Amazon MGM Studios, stars Stanley Tucci as Roger, a veteran thief who wants the most famous painting in the world. He recruits two young specialists for the job, then tells them they are brother and sister, and that he is their father.

Simona Tabasco plays Chiara, whom Amazon describes as “a sharp Italian cybercrime expert”. Victor Belmondo plays Jay, “a swaggering French explosives specialist”. The two have never met. The official logline delivers the reveal with a shrug: Roger recruits two young strangers before revealing they are long-lost siblings, “and oh yes, by the way, he is their father”. Thrown into a reunion none of them asked for, the three have to learn to work together if the job is going to happen at all.

That is the whole engine of the film as Prime Video has sold it. A heist story usually spends its first act gathering experts who do not trust each other. Masterplan keeps that scene and adds a twist that turns a professional problem into a family one. Sortir à Paris, reading the trailer, put it neatly: the siblings’ distrust of each other may prove as hard to get past as the painting’s security.

A Louvre heist on screen, and a real one days into the shoot

Italian press reported in mid-October 2025 that cameras were already rolling, at locations split between France and Italy. Sky TG24 wrote on 14 October that the shoot had begun. Five days later, on 19 October 2025, thieves disguised as construction workers used a truck-mounted furniture lift to reach a window of the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon. They took eight pieces of the French Crown Jewels, including jewellery that had belonged to Empress Eugénie and an emerald necklace and earrings Napoleon gave Marie-Louise, and were gone in under eight minutes, in the middle of opening hours.

The Paris prosecutor valued the haul at about 88 million euros. France’s interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, called it “a major, highly organized operation”. It was the first art theft at the Louvre since 1998.

Nothing in the film’s publicity connects the two events. Masterplan was written and in production before the robbery, and its target is a painting, not a display case of jewels. But the calendar changes how the film arrives. A comedy about walking out of the Louvre with its most guarded object now lands almost exactly a year after that robbery. The tech and entertainment site T3, previewing the trailer, made the same point and called the timing well chosen.

The only time the Mona Lisa actually left

The painting has been stolen once. On 21 August 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian decorator who had briefly worked at the Louvre as a glazier, walked in on the museum’s weekly closing day wearing the white smock the staff wore. He lifted the Mona Lisa off its pegs in the Salon Carré, removed the frame on a service stairway and left through a service door. Nobody noticed it was gone until the next day, when a painter arrived to copy it. Peruggia was arrested in Florence in December 1913, more than two years later.

Masterplan is not a retelling of that case. The German film site Filmstarts notes that the 1911 theft was not a direct inspiration. The coincidence of nationality is still hard to miss. The only man who ever got the painting out of the building was an Italian working in Paris, and Masterplan’s crew splits along exactly that line: a hacker from Rome and an explosives expert from Paris, in what Prime Video presents as its first Franco-Italian original film.

Who made Masterplan

The director is Thomas Vincent, whose television work includes Reacher, Bodyguard and Versailles. His previous feature was Role Play, with Kaley Cuoco. He wrote the screenplay with David Wolstencroft, the BAFTA-winning creator of Spooks and writer of The Escape Artist. The story is credited to Giacomo Durzi, Alessandro Fabbri, Alberto Vignati, Wolstencroft and Vincent.

Gaumont brings its own Louvre history to the project. The French studio produced Lupin for Netflix, a series that opens with a job inside the museum. Here it shares production with Amazon MGM Studios, and the film was shot in English, a choice that points it at a worldwide audience rather than a domestic French or Italian one.

Stanley Tucci, an Academy Award nominee known for The Devil Wears Prada, The Hunger Games and Poor Things, went into Masterplan straight after shooting The Devil Wears Prada 2. T3’s preview singled out the moustache and accent he wears in the trailer. Simona Tabasco became known to international audiences through the second season of The White Lotus. Victor Belmondo, seen in Bastion 36, is the grandson of Jean-Paul Belmondo; his father, Paul Belmondo, drove in Formula 1 in the early 1990s.

What the premise is betting on

The heist film has always run on recruitment. Ocean’s Eleven made the gathering of specialists its main pleasure, and How to Steal a Million turned a Paris museum job into a romantic comedy decades earlier. Masterplan’s premise suggests a different bet: that the hardest lock to pick is not on the painting but between three people who share a surname they did not know about.

That also tells you what kind of film this is likely to be. The trailer, as Sortir à Paris describes it, mixes heist thriller, action and family humour, and the logline’s offhand tone (“and oh yes, by the way”) sets a light register rather than a tense one. Everything Prime Video has shown so far points to a light caper rather than a grim one.

What the premise cannot settle in advance is the question at its centre. Roger walks back into his children’s lives with a job offer. Whether one theft can earn a father a place in a family he was missing from, or whether recruiting his children for a crime simply repeats the original absence in a new form, is something no clean getaway can answer.

Masterplan: quick answers

Is Masterplan based on a true story? No. It is an original story. The Mona Lisa really was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, but that case was not the film’s direct inspiration, and the film was already shooting before the 2025 Louvre jewel robbery.

Is Masterplan a film or a series? It is a feature film, a Prime Original.

Who is in the cast? Stanley Tucci as Roger, Simona Tabasco as Chiara and Victor Belmondo as Jay. Thomas Vincent directs.

Where can I watch Masterplan? Exclusively on Prime Video, included with a Prime membership.

Release date

Masterplan premieres on Prime Video on 16 October 2026, exclusively, in more than 240 countries and territories. The film is in English. Amazon released a teaser on 9 July 2026 and the official trailer on 23 September 2026.