Amazon MGM Studios dropped this week the trailer for The Thomas Crown Affair, a remake of the acclaimed 1968 film that will open in theaters on March 5, 2027. Directed by and starring Academy Award–winning actor Michael B. Jordan, the trailer already hints at the art-related plot points for the film.
About 12 seconds into the trailer, Jordan’s Thomas Crown faces some built-in bookshelves that slide apart to reveal a hidden room where he stores his stolen paintings. On a metal rack, resembling the sliding vertical racks often used in museum and gallery storage, are four paintings. Crown holds another canvas in his hands to add to his collection of looted masterpieces.
By ARTnews’s estimations, these paintings, from left to right, are Caravaggio’s The Fortune Teller (ca. 1594), owned by Capitoline Museums in Rome; 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 University Museum in Virginia; and Kerry James Marshall’s Silence is Golden (1986), owned by the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Per Deadline, the 2027 Thomas Crown Affair also stars Adria Arjona as an “insurance investigator smart enough to catch” Jordan’s Crown and Kenneth Branagh as a villain-target of Crown. Footage shown at CinemaCon “centered on a cat and mouse between the two leads as they fall for each other against a backdrop of august museums, slick cities and European castles,” the publication adds.
The original Thomas Crown Affair, from 1968 and starring Steve McQueen in the titular role, doesn’t involve the theft of artworks but a bank heist. Though when Pierce Brosnan took up the role in the 1999 remake, Crown steals Monet’s San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk (1908–12) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, though that painting actually belongs to the National Museum Cardiff in Wales.
In an interview with Variety, Jordan pushed back on the connections with the two past versions of the film, saying, “I didn’t want a reboot. I wanted a reimagination. The first two films were about rich white guys stealing for fun. That doesn’t land today. Ours is more personal. The stakes are higher. Still got the fashion, romance.”
The Thomas Crown Affair isn’t the first time a character played by Jordan has an artful interaction. In Black Panther (2018), Jordan’s Killmonger visits the Museum of Great Britian, a stand in for the British Museum in London but filmed at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and stands before a vitrine holding various African artifacts, including a 19th-century mask created by Bobo Ashanti tribe in present-day Ghana and a 16th-century one from the Edo people of Benin, per the film. After a terse exchange with one of the museum’s curators, Killmonger and his collaborators smash a case holding a weapon made from Wakanda’s vibranium before jetting off with it.
Of course, a number of other films have also featured art-related heists or alluded to their off-camera thefts. The most famous of these comes from the first James Bond film, Dr. No (1962), which includes a reproduction of Francisco Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington (1812–14) that Bond spots in the titular villain’s lair. The Wellington portrait had been stolen from the National Gallery in London in August 1961, less than a month after the museum had purchased it for £140,000. When Dr. No premiered in October 1962, the painting was still missing. It was eventually recovered in 1965.
As Andrew Marzoni wrote in ARTnews, “A clever wink typical of Bond-movie camp, the [theft of the Wellington] portrait symbolically inaugurates the cinema of art crime, a distinctly postwar phenomenon whose forgeries and thefts have less to say about art than they do about Hollywood conventions.”
Watch the full trailer for The Thomas Crown Affair (2027) below.
