How to Make a Killing

How to Make a Killing, a comedy-thriller produced by StudioCanal, StudioCanal UK, and Blue Ice Africa, is scheduled for release on February 16, 2026.

The film centers on Becket Redfellow, a blue-collar man who was disowned at birth by his obscenely wealthy family and who, upon deciding to reclaim his inheritance, begins working his way through whatever relatives stand between him and his share of the fortune. That premise — a dispossessed outsider turning on the moneyed class that cast him out — sits comfortably within a comedy-thriller tradition that has always found dark humor in the mechanics of greed, succession, and family dysfunction. The genre tends to work best when its tone is carefully calibrated: too broad, and the thriller elements collapse; too grim, and the comedy curdles. Where How to Make a Killing falls on that spectrum is one of the more interesting questions its premise raises.

StudioCanal, the French studio and distributor with a long presence in British and European co-productions, is joined here by its UK division and Blue Ice Africa, a combination that suggests a production with at least some international dimension, though the film's origin country is not specified in available materials. English is the film's original language, and the involvement of StudioCanal UK points toward a British or British-adjacent production sensibility — a tradition that, from Kind Hearts and Coronets onward, has shown particular appetite for comedies about inheritance, class, and murder conducted with a straight face and a sardonic eye.

The logline is economical to the point of withholding quite a lot. It establishes Becket's motivation and his willingness to act on it, but it leaves open almost everything that would determine whether the film is playing its premise as farce, as satire, as genuine suspense, or as some layered combination of the three. The phrase "no matter how many relatives stand in his way" does a quiet amount of work — it implies a body count, or at least the threat of one, and it frames Becket less as a wronged innocent seeking justice than as someone whose moral accounting has already been revised under pressure. Whether the film positions him as antihero, comic villain, or something harder to classify is not apparent from what has been released.

The structure of the story — a single outsider moving through a wealthy family's hierarchy toward a goal — invites comparisons to ensemble dark comedies built around contested estates and dysfunctional dynasties. But those comparisons can only go so far without knowing more about tone, execution, and whether the film is operating as a genuine thriller with comedic overtones or a comedy that borrows the grammar of suspense. The comedy-thriller hybrid is a classification that covers considerable ground.

What the early audience data does offer is a picture of modest but real engagement. The film carries an IMDb rating of 6.5 from just over 24,000 votes and a TMDB average of 6.9 from roughly 530 ratings, numbers that suggest a release that has found an audience without generating strong consensus in either direction. A Metascore of 49, sitting just below the midpoint of the critical scale, indicates a divided or lukewarm critical reception — the kind of score that tends to accompany films that work for some viewers on their own terms while failing to cohere for others. None of this is definitive, but it sketches the outline of a film that provokes genuine response without resolving into something universally championed or dismissed.

On the distribution side, the film will be available to stream on HBO Max, with rental and purchase options across Amazon Video, Apple TV Store, Google Play Movies, YouTube, Fandango At Home, and Plex. That streaming home on HBO Max gives the film a reasonably prominent platform, one that has shown consistent interest in acquiring dark comedy and thriller-adjacent material. The availability across every major transactional platform means access will not be a barrier for anyone who wants to seek it out.

The February 16 release date — a Monday in the middle of a month that historically receives less theatrical prestige programming — might suggest a release timed to capitalize on the long Presidents' Day weekend in the United States, though the specifics of whether the film is receiving a theatrical run or debuting directly to streaming are not established in available materials. The combination of StudioCanal's involvement and an HBO Max streaming home is consistent with either a limited theatrical window or a straight-to-streaming approach, both of which have become increasingly common for mid-budget genre pictures without clear franchise anchoring.

The audience most likely to seek out How to Make a Killing is probably self-selecting: viewers who come to dark comedy with patience for stories where the comedy and the menace share the same breath, and who find the premise of a disowned heir methodically dismantling a wealthy family's claim on him to be a sufficient hook. Whether the film delivers on that premise with craft and originality, or whether it coasts on a setup more interesting than its execution, remains the central open question.