The Wrap has taken a look at the journey to bring Michael Mann’s sequel to Heat to the big screen. The journey was a bumpy one, but everything is in place and gearing up for its start date in November. Heat 2 was originally to be developed at Warner Bros., who made the first film, but the studio couldn’t agree with Mann on a budget. The director would then shop the movie around to other studios and Amazon MGM would win in the end along with United Artists.
The sequel looks to be quite as ambitious as the first movie was at the time. With stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Christian Bale and Adam Driver in tow, along with hyped action scenes that are said to dwarf the original, Amazon MGM has all the confidence that this movie will be a colossal success. A source from the production even claimed, “Heat 2 could do for men of different ages what Barbie did for women. It won’t reach the same box office but it could easily approach more than $500 million which would make the film profitable theatrically and then a huge hit for Amazon on their platform.”
According to The Wrap, people in the Heat 2 camp are also plotting another sequel, which aims to expand even more on Heat lore (as well as its related properties and products).
DiCaprio had recently teased that he sees the sequel as more of a homage to the original movie. “This is very much its own movie. We’re still working on it, we’re a ways away from production,” DiCaprio said. “It tips its hat to Heat, but it’s an homage, and it picks up the story from there. The book is already out there, so there are no big secrets that I’m divulging. It’s set in the future, and the past, from that pivotal moment in what I think is the great crime noir film of my lifetime. It’s one of those films that just keeps resonating, that we keep talking about, that has been imitated so many times and influenced so many different movies. So, we’re working on it. But it’s certainly exciting, and I think I look at it as its own silo, in a sense. We can’t duplicate what Heat was, so it’s paying homage to that film, but giving it its own unique entity.“
Mann will direct Heat 2 from his own script, which is adapted from the 2022 novel he wrote with Meg Gardiner. The story is both a prequel and a sequel. It looks at Vincent Hanna’s years in Chicago, Neil McCauley’s earlier criminal life, and Chris Shiherlis’s survival after the bank robbery depicted in the original film.