Rumours about a sequel to Michael Mann’s 1995 heist thriller Heat have been circulating since the director’s novelized sequel/prequel with novelist Meg Gardiner was announced. One further reason for fans to get excited about this possibility was when actor Al Pacino, who plays intrepid Lt. Vincent Hanna in the film, said at Tribeca that he would love to see Timothée Chalamet play his younger self in a movie adaptation of the novel. Even more importantly, Heat 2 has been confirmed as a reality by the film’s writer and director on July 30. Heat 2 has been in the works for about three decades, which isn’t as long as a nearly forty-year gap sequel like Top Gun: Maverick.
An interview with Deadline revealed that director Michael Mann has always intended to revisit Hanna and master criminal Neil McCauley’s story, saying, “There was always a rich history or back-story about the events in these people’s lives before 1995 in Heat and a projection of where their lives would take them thereafter.” HarperCollins’ next novel, slated to be released on August 9th, is a sprawling examination of the six years before Heat’s events, commencing one day after the film’s final credits had rolled.
Rather than staying focused on Los Angeles as it did in the first film, this sequel takes a broader view of worldwide crime, while still trying to get to the heart of what made Hanna and McCauley the noir figures they’d become in Heat. Heat 2 is coming shortly, according to a tweet from director Michael Mann, who made the film’s sequel official.
Mann has this to say about the impending novel and film: Writing the picture, I had to know everything about all the characters, even Neil McCauley’s early institutionalised years when he had lost sight of his brother before he jumped onto the streets as a young man furious and dangerous.” It also portrays a McCauley who has deeply connected and the tragic circumstances that culminated in his rule “if you’re making moves on the street, have no attachments; let nothing to be in your life that you cannot walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you notice the heat around the corner” When Heat debuted in 1995, it was the first movie to pit two of Hollywood’s biggest names against one another, but only after director Paul Schrader painstakingly built up exactly the right amount of suspense. In the end, the two characters had to be responsible for each other’s demise.
Pacino and De Niro star as two conflicted characters, one a great police investigator and the other a superb burglar, who are doomed to face off against one another by the forces of destiny. That which they were moulded by metal and fire, to their own disadvantage, will be explored in Mann’s follow-up to The Crucible. Mann is a director who is committed to making pictures that can never be questioned as to their veracity. Neil McCauley, a real-life criminal maestro, serves as a model for Hanna’s “restless ambition,” which Mann ties to his own existential examination in an interview with the New York Times. Cynicism towards the system is a theme that the director acknowledges he inherited from his father.
He strives to keep his films like 1981’s Thief, Miami Vice and Collateral grounded in reality while still managing to create cinematic moments that solidify his films as works of art in the minds of audiences. After returning to the world Mann has been imagining since the late 1970s, Heat 2 will bring the story to a satisfying finish that Mann describes as “both ironic and comprehensive.” Fans will learn more about Hanna and McCauley, as well as discover where McCauley’s protégé, Chris Shiherlis, ended up after the end of Heat (Val Kilmer).