Set It Off

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Research record

Set It Off · Staged record CTL-W-1276 · Entity Depth Program · 748 words · Evidence grade: VERIFIED (canonical master, carried unchanged) · Researched 2026-10-25

Set It Off premiered on November 4, 1996, at Mann's Chinese Theatre and opened across the United States on November 6, 1996, from New Line Cinema. It was directed by F. Gary Gray — the credit the Film at Lincoln Center listing verifying this record carries, with its 1996 date and its four leads — and written by Kate Lanier and Takashi Bufford from Bufford's story; Bufford said he wrote the script with his two eventual stars already in mind. The film cost nine million dollars and grossed more than forty-one million worldwide, and it was New Line's highest-grossing film of its year. Kimberly Elise made her film acting debut in it.

The four friends are drawn as an economy before they are drawn as a crew. Francesca "Frankie" Sutton, played by Vivica A. Fox, is a bank teller fired after a robbery at her branch because she recognized one of the robbers from her neighborhood and a detective falsely treats her as an accomplice. Lida "Stony" Newsom, played by Jada Pinkett, works a menial janitorial job alongside Frankie, loses her brother Stevie to a police shooting after he is mistaken for a robber, and has already traded sex with a car salesman for the tuition advance Stevie lied about needing. Cleopatra "Cleo" Sims, played by Queen Latifah, is the group's nerve. Tisean "T.T." Williams, played by Elise, loses her son to Child Protective Services after he is accidentally poisoned at the workplace she could not afford childcare to leave him from. Only then do the four plan a bank robbery, using Frankie's insider knowledge of bank protocol, and only then does the film become a heist picture — ending with three of the four dead and Stony escaping to Mexico with the money and the grief. The graph's featured figures are Frankie Sutton, Stony, Cleo Sims, and T.T. Williams: the point of the modeling is that the women, not the robberies, are the work.

The opening numbers recorded how the film landed. Released on a Wednesday, it grossed 1.8 million dollars on its first day from 972 theaters — first place at the box office that day — and 11.8 million across its first five days, finishing its first weekend behind only the Mel Gibson thriller Ransom. Contemporary box-office reporting credited the soundtrack, then the fifth-best-selling soundtrack album of 1996, with widening the audience beyond the young Black women the film was aimed at, and New Line had its biggest hit of the year. The grosses were made against an R rating and a nine-million-dollar negative cost — the market confirming what the reviews were saying.

The New York Times's Stephen Holden heard both halves of the film at once: among heist movies that make you root for the criminals, he wrote, Gray's is "one of the most poignantly impassioned," a film that, however messy, "never for a second loses empathy" for its four women. That empathy is the documented through-line of the reception — Ebert's surprise at caring, CinemaScore's A from paying audiences, the Independent Spirit and NAACP nominations for Latifah, and the film's later scholarly life, where Kara Keeling's essay placed Cleo and Ursula's relationship inside queer film studies and Black feminist criticism as a landmark of butch-femme representation. Set It Off was received, in its moment and after, as a crime film about the crimes that preceded the crime.

Critics got it at the time. Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half stars, writing that it creates a portrait of the lives of these women that is observant and informed, and that he expected a routine action picture and was amazed how much he came to care about the characters; audiences gave it an A from CinemaScore, and it holds a 71 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, whose consensus calls it a satisfying, socially conscious heist film. Gray won Best Director at the 1997 Acapulco Black Film Festival, and Latifah was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female and an NAACP Image Award. The soundtrack was a commercial force of its own, peaking at number four on the Billboard 200. In scholarship, Kara Keeling's reading of Cleo and her girlfriend Ursula established the film's place in queer film studies and Black feminist criticism. CTL holds Set It Off as a 1996 film work directed by F. Gary Gray: a heist movie whose engine is janitorial wages, a false accusation, a brother's funeral, and a child taken by the state.

Sources for this record

• Set It Off — Film at Lincoln Center
  Claims supported: Directed by F. Gary Gray, 1996, United States; cast Vivica A. Fox (Frankie), Queen Latifah (Cleo), Jada Pinkett Smith (Stony), and Kimberly Elise (T.T.) — listing carried in the CTL record.
• Set It Off (film) — Wikipedia
  Claims supported: Screenplay by Kate Lanier and Takashi Bufford, story by Bufford, who wrote with Pinkett and Latifah in mind; New Line Cinema; premiere November 4, 1996 at Mann's Chinese Theatre, U.S. release November 6, 1996; budget $9 million, gross $41.5 million, New Line's highest-grossing film of 1996; Kimberly Elise's film acting debut; plot and character circumstances (Frankie's firing, Stevie's killing, T.T.'s child, the robberies, and the ending); soundtrack peaked at number four on the Billboard 200 and number three on Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums; Ebert's three-and-a-half-star review; CinemaScore A; Rotten Tomatoes 71 percent; Gray's Acapulco Best Director award; Latifah's Independent Spirit and NAACP nominations; Kara Keeling's queer-film-studies reading of Cleo and Ursula.

Citations

Published October 25, 2026, from the head-verified staged record in the Entity Depth Program (Batches 001–003). Source: CultureTechLens