Heat 2: Michael Mann wants to turn his sequel novel into a movie

Heat director Michael Mann will be returning to his celebrated crime epic next month with a sequel novel he wrote with Meg Gardiner. It’s been nearly thirty years since the first movie was released, but Mann told Empire that he intends on bringing Heat 2 to the big screen.

“It’s totally planned to be a movie,” said Michael Mann of Heat 2. “Is it a modest movie? No. Is it a very expensive series? No. It’s going to be one large movie.” Heat 2 begins just one day after the events of the original movie as it follows a wounded Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) desperately trying to escape Los Angeles. The story flashes back and forth to events years before the heist and the years immediately following it. Unless they go The Irishman route, Mann admits that there’s no way Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, or Val Kilmer would be able to reprise their roles. Hollywood is also a very different place than when the original movie was released in 1995, but Michael Mann believes audiences are ready for a new story in the Heat universe.

It’s sustained in culture. It’s known. I could delude myself into thinking that the whole world is familiar with it, but when you check out its prominence in home vid for over 20 years, this thing really has legs. People are still watching it, people are still talking about it. It’s a brand. It’s kind of a Heat universe, in a way. And that certainly justifies a very large ambitious movie.

If Heat 2 does become a movie somewhere down the road and the central characters are recast, Al Pacino already knows who should replace him. “Timothée Chalamet… He’s a wonderful actor,” Pacino said last month. Here’s the official synopsis for the Heat 2 novel:

One day after the end of Heat, Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) is holed up in Koreatown, wounded, half delirious, and desperately trying to escape LA. Hunting him is LAPD detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). Hours earlier, Hanna killed Shiherlis’s brother in arms Neil McCauley (De Niro) in a gunfight under the strobe lights at the foot of an LAX runway. Now Hanna’s determined to capture or kill Shiherlis, the last survivor of McCauley’s crew, before he ghosts out of the city. In 1988, seven years earlier, McCauley, Shiherlis, and their highline crew are taking scores on the West Coast, the US-Mexican border, and now in Chicago. Driven, daring, they’re pulling in money and living vivid lives. And Chicago homicide detective Vincent Hanna—a man unreconciled with his history—is following his calling, the pursuit of armed and dangerous men into the dark and wild places, hunting an ultraviolent gang of home invaders. Meanwhile, the fallout from McCauley’s scores and Hanna’s pursuit cause unexpected repercussions in a parallel narrative, driving through the years following Heat.

Heat 2 will be released on August 9th. You can pre-order the book here and the new 4K Blu-ray of the original movie right here. Would you like to see a movie adaptation of Heat 2?