The Thomas Crown Affair is a 1999 American romantic heist film directed by John McTiernan and written by Leslie Dixon and Kurt Wimmer.

Its story follows Thomas Crown, a billionaire who steals a painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is pursued by an insurance investigator, with the two falling in love.

Thieves infiltrate the Metropolitan Museum of Art inside an actual Trojan horse, preparing to steal an entire gallery of paintings, but are apprehended.

In the confusion, billionaire Thomas Crown – the crime's secret mastermind – steals Monet's painting of San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk.

Banning and McCann discover that the fake Monet is in fact an expert forgery that could only have been painted by someone with access to the original; they visit the likeliest forger, Heinrich Knutzhorn, in prison, to no avail, although his body language suggests to them that he recognizes the work.

Crown offers to return the Monet by putting it back on the wall of the museum, and gives Banning a time and place to meet him when he's finished.

Banning learns from McCann that the fake Monet was painted by Anna; the imprisoned forger Knutzhorn is her father, a former business partner of Crown, who became her guardian.

Before the police can apprehend him, Crown blends into the crowd, aided by lookalikes in bowler hats à la Magritte's The Son of Man.

[3][4] Pierce Brosnan and his fellow producers considered several directors (including Mike Newell, Andrew Davis, Roger Donaldson) before returning to their original choice.

McTiernan also deemed a polo match that was used in the original and had been rewritten into the new script to be clichéd, and he wanted a scene that conveyed more action and excitement, not just wealth.

[citation needed] Originally, an elaborate 30-page sequence of the theft of the final painting was planned, although McTiernan removed this in favor of a simple mystified response by Denis Leary's character when asked how it was taken.

The glider scenes were shot at Ridge Soaring Gliderport and Eagle Field in Pennsylvania and at Corning-Painted Post Airport in New York.

The Thomas Crown Affair was released on DVD in the LaserDisc format on January 4, 2000, in the United States by MGM Home Entertainment.

The website's consensus reads: "Sleek, stylish, and painlessly diverting, The Thomas Crown Affair is a remake of uncommon charm.

"[14] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 72 out of 100, based on 23 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

[20] The initial script was penned by John Rogers from a story he had co-written with Harley Peyton while additional material was provided by Nick Meyer, Michael Finch and Karl Gajdusek.

In the April 2014 edition of Empire, two months after completing a one-year prison term on multiple felony convictions, John McTiernan revealed that he had written a script while incarcerated, for a sequel called Thomas Crown and the Missing Lioness.