LOS ANGELES
Prime Video has a new heist to sell this weekend, and this one comes with a family secret at the center of it. Masterplan, a French-Italian Prime Video original film, premiered Friday, October 16 in more than 240 countries and territories, according to Prime Video listings reported by ComingSoon and TV Central. Stanley Tucci stars as Roger, a retired master thief who decides to attempt one last, impossible job: stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in Paris. It is the kind of premise that needs no embellishment. The painting is among the most famous and most heavily guarded artworks in the world, and Roger knows his own experience alone will not be enough to get near it.
So he builds a team, and the team is where the film finds both its engine and its complication. According to the synopses published ahead of the premiere, Roger recruits two younger specialists who have never met. Simona Tabasco plays Chiara, an Italian cybercrime expert — described in the trailer coverage as a hacking specialist who can handle the digital side of a modern museum job. Victor Belmondo plays Jay, a French explosives expert whose skills cover the physical side Roger cannot manage on his own. On paper, it is a clean division of labor: one person for the systems, one person for the barriers, and a veteran thief to hold the plan together.
Then Roger tells them the truth about why he chose them. Chiara and Jay are siblings — long-lost brother and sister — and Roger is their father. Multiple outlets, including ComingSoon in its trailer report and the syndicated trailer coverage published October 12, described the same reveal: the mastermind leading the operation is the recruits' father, and the two specialists must now work with a parent they did not know they shared. The heist does not pause for the reunion. Instead, the film asks whether three people with every reason to distrust one another can stay focused long enough to pull off what the coverage has billed as the heist of the century.
A director who knows tension, and a script built for it
Behind the camera, Masterplan is directed by Thomas Vincent, whose television credits include Reacher, Bodyguard and Versailles, according to the production details reported by ComingSoon and TV Central. Vincent co-wrote the screenplay with David Wolstencroft, the BAFTA-winning writer who created Spooks. The underlying story is credited to Giacomo Durzi, Alessandro Fabbri, Alberto Vignati, Wolstencroft and Vincent. That writing room explains the film's shape: part caper, part family drama, with the procedural pleasures of a heist — recruitment, planning, infiltration — carrying the emotional story rather than pausing for it.
The production itself is part of the story Prime Video is telling about its international slate. The film is a co-production between Gaumont and Amazon MGM Studios, filmed on location in France and Italy, and shot in English for its global release, TV Central reported. Where to Watch, in its preview of the premiere, described Masterplan as Prime Video's first French-Italian original film — a notable marker for a service that has been building out European originals alongside its American slate. A Louvre heist led by an American star, played out by Italian and French co-leads, is exactly the kind of package that strategy is designed to produce: local texture, international cast, a premise anyone in any territory understands in one sentence.
Tucci, Tabasco and Belmondo: a cast built across borders
Tucci brings the marquee name and, by the trailer coverage, a familiar register: the calm, amused authority of a man who has done this before and enjoys watching younger people realize how hard it is. His filmography, noted in TV Central's preview, runs from The Devil Wears Prada and The Hunger Games to an Academy Award nomination for The Lovely Bones. Roger appears designed to use all of that — charm on the surface, calculation underneath, and a personal motive he withholds until the team is already committed.
Tabasco reached a global audience in the second season of The White Lotus, and Chiara gives her a very different kind of role: the specialist whose value is precision rather than improvisation. Belmondo, whose recent credits include the French action thriller Bastion 36, plays the counterpart — the explosives expert whose work is loud by definition. The sibling reveal lands differently on each of them, and that asymmetry is the film's best idea. A heist team is supposed to be a machine. A family is the opposite of a machine, and Masterplan spends its premise forcing the same three people to be both at once.
Where it fits in a crowded streaming Friday
Masterplan arrives on one of the busiest streaming Fridays of the fall. It shares its October 16 Prime Video premiere date with Scream 7, which began streaming the same day — a pairing we cover in our Scream 7 streaming report. For viewers deciding what the weekend holds, our weekend viewing guide rounds up the full slate, and the Streaming Friday rundown covers the rest of the day's drops across services. You can also browse the wider catalog in Previously's browse section.
What Masterplan offers that a franchise sequel cannot is a closed story: one job, one family, one painting. There is no homework, no previous season to catch up on, and no post-credits promise to keep track of. If the execution matches the premise — and the talent on both sides of the camera suggests it should, at minimum, be a polished night's entertainment — this is the kind of mid-budget, star-led original that streaming was supposed to make more of. It is streaming now on Prime Video. The only question the film leaves open is the one Roger has been asking from the start: can this family actually work together, or will the reunion be the thing that gets them all caught?
