The headline. The Insta360 X5 has made its Hollywood film debut in How to Rob a Bank, the action film directed by David Leitch (Bullet Train, The Fall Guy), now playing only in theatres. This is not a product placement in the background: the X5 is the camera of choice for the film’s crew of social-media-savvy bank robbers, and footage captured on the X5 appears in the finished film.
The film in brief. Starring Nicholas Hoult, Zoë Kravitz, Anna Sawai, Rhenzy Feliz, Christian Slater, Pete Davidson and John C. Reilly, the story follows a crew of bank robbers who broadcast their daring heists — unaware that their growing viral fame has put them in the crosshairs of a veteran FBI agent and a brilliant software engineer. The film was produced by Brian Grazer, Jeb Brody, Allan Mandelbaum, Kelly McCormick and David Leitch.
Two visual languages, one film. The production faced an unusual creative problem: the characters are both bank robbers and content creators who film their own exploits, so the film needed traditional 35mm cinematography and character-shot social media videos to work side by side as one story. Carefully composed 35mm photography captures the characters’ lives and emotions, while their heist videos needed to feel energetic and believable as content the characters would shoot themselves. After extensive testing during pre-production, Insta360 emerged as the fit for that raw, spontaneous visual style.
Reframing in the edit — the X5’s real job. Beyond capturing the action from the characters’ perspective, the X5 let the filmmakers explore different compositions from a single take. During pre-production, Jimmy Johenning, Producer of Digital Sequences, demonstrated the reframing to Leitch and director of photography Jonathan Sela by handing them an iPad and letting them explore the footage in real time. As Leitch puts it: “When we needed a shot and we had a 360 running, we could literally create a shot.” Post Production Supervisor Jacob Donohue gives the practical example: if a shot first looked down the barrel of a gun but the director later wanted to see the person holding it, the team could return to the same 360 footage and reframe it. One recorded moment could offer different perspectives as the edit evolved.
Scale of the shoot. The team typically had seven or eight Insta360 cameras running per shooting day, with as many as 12 to 20 deployed during individual heist sequences. On motorcycles and moving vehicles, capturing the entire scene also let the filmmakers shape camera movements in post that would have been difficult or effectively impossible to execute physically at those speeds.
The shots a normal rig could not get. The crew explored placements that would be difficult with conventional setups. For Jonathan Sela, placing an X5 inside a money bag offered a particularly compelling perspective: the camera captured the robbers throwing cash into the bag, turning it around and tossing it, bringing the audience directly into the action. Another shot looks through a stack of banknotes as the robbers flip through the money — a favourite of Donohue’s. The camera’s compact design and wide field of view made these unconventional placements possible, while larger rigs would have struggled to reach them. For David Myrick, Director of Photography for the YouTube unit, the cameras opened up possibilities beyond dollies, Steadicams and cranes: “This was just kind of like there were no rules.”
Built for a demanding set. The fast-moving sequences put the X5’s stabilisation and horizon levelling to the test. With cameras mounted on moving vehicles and actors, FlowState Stabilization and 360° Horizon Lock helped keep footage smooth and level despite movement and vibration — Johenning called FlowState Stabilization a “game changer” for car scenes, motorcycles and fight sequences. The replaceable lens design proved equally practical: the production went through approximately 20 to 30 lenses but only around two camera bodies, with both lenses replaceable in less than a minute, so cameras got back into use quickly.
From set to cinema screen. For 360 footage to make the final cut of a theatrical feature, it had to meet the film’s image-quality standards and fit an established professional workflow. The team processed and reframed the footage in Insta360 Studio before transcoding it to ProRes for use in DaVinci Resolve and Avid, letting the 360 footage sit alongside material captured with traditional cameras. The team was pleased with how the 360 footage looked on the big screen — a genuine theatrical test for a consumer 360 camera.
Why it matters for creators. This is the same camera you can buy: the X5 shoots 8K 360 capture, and everything the film leaned on — reframe-after-the-fact, stabilisation that holds up at speed, and lenses you can swap in under a minute instead of binning a camera — is in the consumer model. Read our full Insta360 X5 review for the sensor, low-light and battery detail, and if you want the newest model in the line, our Insta360 X6 review covers its successor. Hollywood just proved what the X5 can do when the shot cannot be repeated — for the rest of us, it means the angle you missed on the day is still in the footage.
Sources: Insta360 press release via PR Newswire, 13 Nov 2026, “Insta360 Brings 360 Camera Technology to the Big Screen in New Film How to Rob a Bank”; RedShark.