Highest 2 Lowest Is Denzel Washington’s Last Movie With Spike Lee

Highest 2 Lowest director Spike Lee said in a new interview that the movie was the final collaborative venture between him and Denzel Washington. Notably, Washington and Lee have previously worked together in four other projects: Mo’ Better Blues (1990), Malcolm X (1992), He Got Game (1998), and Inside Man (2006).

Spike Lee says Highest 2 Lowest is Denzel Washington’s last movie with him

Spike Lee revealed that Highest 2 Lowest was his final movie with Denzel Washington at the film’s premiere at Cannes. “This is the fifth one we’ve done together,” the iconic filmmaker said about his professional relationship with Washington.

“It has been a blessing, this body of work between us, doing films that people love. And I think this is it. He’s been talking about retirement. But five films together: that’s good, they stand up” (via The Guardian).

Notably, Washington, 70, has been speaking about retirement for some time. He told The Today Show in November 2024 that he intended to retire after completing several upcoming projects, including Black Panther 3 and a cinematic rendition of Othello.

The collaboration between Lee and Washington has produced some of the most memorable characters of cinema. In Mo’ Better Blues, Washington portrays Bleek Gilliam, a fictional jazz trumpeter, whose life spirals out of control due to bad decisions.

Washington played the eponymous social activist in Malcolm X, a role for which Lee reportedly believes that Washington should have won the Oscar for Best Actor. “What he did with that film was amazing,” Lee said at Cannes. “No disrespect to my brother Al Pacino – I love him. But Denzel in my opinion should have won.”

Additionally, Washington portrayed Jake Shuttlesworth, a convict trying to get an early release, in He Got Game and Detective Keith Frazier in Inside Man. The two-time Oscar winner essays the role of David King in the neo-noir crime thriller Highest 2 Lowest. Its logline reads, “When a titan music mogul, widely known as having the ‘best ears in the business,’ is targeted with a ransom plot, he is jammed up in a life-or-death moral dilemma.”

The movie premieres in US theaters on August 22, 2025, and on Apple TV+ on September 5, 2025.

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