How to Rob a Bank Opens Friday With a Livestreamed Heist

The heist crew in How to Rob a Bank doesn't just want the money. It wants the audience. David Leitch's new action comedy opened in theaters on Friday, November 13, built around a gang of bank robbers who livestream their crimes — and it's in cinemas only, with no streaming date attached to the launch.

Nicholas Hoult leads the cast, with Zoë Kravitz, Christian Slater, Anna Sawai and John C. Reilly alongside him, and Pete Davidson in the ensemble. The film runs 122 minutes and carries an R rating. It's an Amazon MGM Studios release, which makes the theaters-only strategy its own statement: a streaming-era studio asking audiences to show up in person first.

Leitch's pitch, in interviews around the release, is that the heist movie needed a 2026 problem. His robbers plan for cameras, followers and virality the way older movie crews planned for getaway routes — the social feed is part of the job, and part of what can go wrong. It's a twist from a director whose last decade runs through Bullet Train, The Fall Guy and Deadpool 2, all built on stunt work first and everything else second.

That résumé is the marketing. Leitch started as a stunt performer and coordinator before he directed, and his films sell physical action — falls, fights and chases performed rather than rendered. A heist gives him a different geometry than an assassin movie or a stuntman romance: enclosed spaces, timed doors, and a crew whose plan has to survive contact with a live audience watching in real time.

The opening weekend competition is stiff. Ebenezer, Paramount's gothic Christmas Carol with Johnny Depp as Scrooge, opened wide the same day, and tracking put it in the $20 million to $25 million range — the favorite for the weekend's top spot. Godzilla Minus Zero, last weekend's number one at just over $30.5 million, is still holding IMAX screens, and The Cat in the Hat is chasing the family audience in its second frame.

It's a crowded Friday the 13th by design. The weekend's full slate spans a Dickens ghost story, this livestream heist, I Play Rocky — the story of Sylvester Stallone fighting to star in his own script, opening in limited release ahead of a November 20 expansion — plus the gothic horror of Victorian Psycho and James Gray's crime drama Paper Tiger in limited release. Studios are treating mid-November as a second summer.

For Hoult, the role is another swing in a run of them. He's spent the last two years alternating franchise-scale parts with stranger, smaller ones, and a charming criminal who performs his crimes for an online audience sits right at the join between the two — a studio action lead playing a man who is, inside the fiction, also performing for followers.

The Stallone film sharing the marquee tells the weekend's other story. I Play Rocky stars Anthony Ippolito as the young Sylvester Stallone, who wrote Rocky and refused life-changing money for the script because the studio wanted a star like Ryan O'Neal in the lead and Stallone's one condition was himself. It runs 127 minutes, is rated PG-13, and expands wide on November 20 — timed to the 50th anniversary of the original 1976 film.

There's an economics lesson in the Leitch bet. Original, star-led action comedies are exactly the category streaming was supposed to have absorbed, and Amazon MGM putting this one in theaters only — no day-and-date, no quick PVOD window announced — is a wager that the theatrical run itself is the marketing for everything the film earns afterward. A strong opening makes the eventual streaming premiere an event. A soft one makes it a library title with a famous director.

The test arrives by Sunday. A theaters-only heist comedy without a superhero or a sequel in its title has to open on word of mouth and the director's name, and it has to do it against a Christmas ghost story tracking ahead of it. If the livestream hook lands with the audience it's depicting, How to Rob a Bank becomes the weekend's argument that an original premise can still sell a ticket. If it doesn't, it's a data point the other way — and there are executives at every studio who'll read it as one.