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Professional thief Neil McCauley lives by one code: don’t get attached to anything that you’re not willing to walk away from in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner. For a while now, it’s seemed as if the man who wrote those words was having trouble following them. Director Michael Mann has been working on Heat 2 for some time, revisiting the characters he created for the 1995 movie even though decades had passed.
But according to Leonardo DiCaprio, who will be replacing Robert De Niro as McCauley for Heat 2, the new movie isn’t quite the rehash one might assume. “This is very much its own movie,” DiCaprio explained to Deadline. “It tips its hat to Heat, but it’s an homage, and it picks up the story from there.”
The original film pit De Niro’s McCauley against LAPD detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), a pair of adversaries who come to respect one another’s devotion to their jobs (it is a Michael Mann story, after all). The film has become an all-time classic for its incredible supporting cast (Val Kilmer! Dennis Haysbert! Wes Studi! Tom Noonan!), Mann’s stylish direction, and, of course, the part where Pacino shouts at Hank Azaria about anatomy and head placement.
Unimpeachable as Heat‘s status may be, it’s not too surprising that Mann would return to his material. Mann regularly recuts and alters his films before, during, and sometimes well after their theatrical releases, giving cinephiles plenty to argue about online. Is the best version of Thief the original 1981 cut, or the version that Mann redid for the Criterion Blu-ray, with an added beach scene? Is the best version of Miami Vice the original cut or the longer director’s cut, which Mann used to prefer and now dislikes?
While these are all re-edits and reimagining of existing works, Heat 2 is something else entirely. Although Mann has been working on the screenplay in some form for decades, it first reached the public in 2022 as a novel. The book follows three different timelines: one in 1988, before the events of the film; another in 1995, focusing on the characters played by Kilmer and Jon Voight immediately after the robbery at the start of the first film; and a third in 2000, in which Hanna is forced to investigate McCauley’s big score once again.
For DiCaprio, that three-part timeline gives Heat 2 more room to distinguish itself from its predecessor. “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,” he said, praising the 1995 movie. “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.”
As a unique entity, Heat 2 will have to stand alone. Will that be enough for lovers of the first movie to give this entry a fair chance? Or will they refuse to let go of their love of Heat, despite what McCauley tried to teach them?
Heat 2 is now in development.
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