It was inevitable: The audacious robbery of the Louvre, in which thieves broke into one of the world’s most well-attended museums in broad daylight and stole $102 million in jewels, will now be a film.
The new film, set to be directed by rising French filmmaker Romain Gavras, will be adapted from Main Basse sur le Louvre (A Grab at the Louvre), a new book released Wednesday in France by French publisher Flammarion. The book was written by three journalists from Le Parisien, Le Monde, and Paris Match and, according to the publisher, shows how “the theft of artworks has become a business like any other for many criminals,” according to Le Monde.
The film rights were recently sold to Iconoclast, the production company behind several recent Harmony Korine movies, including his biggest mainstream hit, Spring Breakers (2013), as well as his much maligned Aggro Dr1ft (2023). The production company has also produced most of Gavras’s films, including The World is Yours (2018), and Athena (2022), which played in competition at the Venice International Film Festival that year. The latter film was a crime drama set in a Paris housing estate following the aftermath of a police killing of a 13-year-old Algerian French boy.
Little has been announced about the film aside from the production company, and its chosen director. However, film aficionados should get their first taste of Gavras’s filmmaking later this year: Netflix is set to release his latest film, Sacrifice, which features Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Evans, and Salma Hayek in an action-comedy about a film star abducted by a radical cult convinced it must sacrifice three people to save humanity. (Sounds quite a bit like Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, but hey, who’s keeping track.)
Rights for a documentary series about the Louvre heist were separately sold to a British producer who has not yet been named.
