Amazon MGM Studios dropped this week the trailer for The Thomas Crown Affair, a remake of the acclaimed 1968 movie that can open in theaters on March 5, 2027. Directed by and starring Academy Award–successful actor Michael B. Jordan, the trailer already hints on the art-related plot factors for the movie.
About 12 seconds into the trailer, Jordan’s Thomas Crown faces some built-in bookshelves that slide aside to disclose a hidden room the place he shops his stolen work. On a steel rack, resembling the sliding vertical racks usually utilized in museum and gallery storage, are 4 work. Crown holds one other canvas in his palms so as to add to his assortment of looted masterpieces.
By ARTnews’s estimations, these work, from left to proper, are Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son (ca. 1820–23), owned by the Museo del Prado in Madrid; Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson (1893), owned by the Hampton College Museum in Virginia; Kerry James Marshall’s Silence is Golden (1986), owned by the Studio Museum in Harlem; and Caravaggio’s The Fortune Teller (ca. 1594), owned by Capitoline Museums in Rome.
Per Deadline, the 2027 Thomas Crown Affair additionally stars Adria Arjona as an “insurance coverage investigator sensible sufficient to catch” Jordan’s Crown and Kenneth Branagh as a villain-target of Crown. Footage proven at CinemaCon “centered on a cat and mouse between the 2 leads as they fall for one another towards a backdrop of august museums, slick cities and European castles,” the publication provides.
The unique Thomas Crown Affair, from 1968 and starring Steve McQueen within the titular function, doesn’t contain the theft of artworks however a financial institution heist. Although when Pierce Brosnan took up the function within the 1999 remake, Crown steals Monet’s San Giorgio Maggiore at Nightfall (1908–12) from the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, although that portray truly belongs to the Nationwide Museum Cardiff in Wales.
In an interview with Selection, Jordan pushed again on the connections with the 2 previous variations of the movie, saying, “I didn’t desire a reboot. I wished a reimagination. The primary two movies have been about wealthy white guys stealing for enjoyable. That doesn’t land in the present day. Ours is extra private. The stakes are greater. Nonetheless bought the style, romance.”
The Thomas Crown Affair isn’t the primary time a personality performed by Jordan has an clever interplay. In Black Panther (2018), Jordan’s Killmonger visits the Museum of Nice Britian, a stand in for the British Museum in London however filmed on the Excessive Museum of Artwork in Atlanta, and stands earlier than a vitrine holding numerous African artifacts, together with a Nineteenth-century masks created by Bobo Ashanti tribe in present-day Ghana and a Sixteenth-century one from the Edo folks of Benin, per the movie. After a terse alternate with one of many museum’s curators, Killmonger and his collaborators smash a case holding a weapon constructed from Wakanda’s vibranium earlier than jetting off with it.
After all, a lot of different movies have additionally featured art-related heists or alluded to their off-camera thefts. Essentially the most well-known of those comes from the primary James Bond movie, Dr. No (1962), which features a copy of Francisco Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington (1812–14) that Bond spots within the titular villain’s lair. The Wellington portrait had been stolen from the Nationwide Gallery in London in August 1961, lower than a month after the museum had bought it for £140,000. When Dr. No premiered in October 1962, the portray was nonetheless lacking. It was ultimately recovered in 1965.
As Andrew Marzoni wrote in ARTnews, “A intelligent wink typical of Bond-movie camp, the [theft of the Wellington] portrait symbolically inaugurates the cinema of artwork crime, a distinctly postwar phenomenon whose forgeries and thefts have much less to say about artwork than they do about Hollywood conventions.”
Watch the total trailer for The Thomas Crown Affair (2027) under.
