There has not been an official casting update on Michael Mann's upcoming sequel to his 1995 masterpiece, Heat, starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino as men on opposite sides of the law. Heat 2, which will be based on the book of the same name Mann co-wrote with Meg Gardiner, will be both a sequel and prequel.
However, Mann, who addressed the press at the Lumiere Film Festival in Lyon, where he received the 2025 Lumiere Award, said the film will oscillate between events in 1995, a day after what we saw at the end of the original, where Val Kilmer's character is the only one among the bank robbers who survives, and has to "flee the United States", and events in 1988 that revolve around Vincent Hanna and Neil McCauley that would transform them to the kind of characters that they were in the 1995 film.
"It’s 1988. Hanna is a detective in Chicago, not Los Angeles… In 1988, they are not the same people as they are in 1995. It’s the events of 1988 which then turned them into the characters of 1995," said Mann, adding that Macaulay once had "a wife, he has a stepdaughter. He has a nuclear family that is very attached to him.”
Mann says he knows every detail about these characters, beginning with their childhood. “The characters of Heat are so alive to me that I know everything about outside the boundaries of the film. I know what De Niro’s character looked like when he was basically state raised as an 11-year-old, wearing clothes that didn’t match, being ostracized, which then made them aggressive and violent, which led to juvenile facilities.”
Mann also shared that the sequel will be even more expensive. "I believe it should be made at the proper size and scale. It’s going to shoot in Chicago, Los Angeles, Paraguay, and possibly some parts in Singapore. People make dramas at a certain budget level, because of the costs, not because of anybody being greedy. If it was at a lower price, I could have made it anywhere. But it’s complex. I can’t get into all the politics of it.”
The project was first taken to Warner Bros. but eventually landed at Amazon MGM-owned United Artists, with a plan to release it theatrically in the United States, "probably in about 4,000 cinemas and for at least 45 days,” said the filmmaker behind other acclaimed thriller such as Collateral, The Insider, and Thief.
