Legendary filmmaker Michael Mann has offered an update on the sequel to 1995’s “Heat” which doesn’t sound quite as far along as has been speculated. Speaking on the podcast (via ), Mann says he’s still working on the screenplay for the film which is being translated from his and Meg Gardiner’s “Heat 2” book released in 2022. He adds that he’s “had some conversations with some people” but wouldn’t go into any further detail about whom was onboard saying he won’t really do any actual casting “until the screenplay is written”. Here’s Mann on the current status of the movie: “I’m writing the screenplay right now, and it comes from having so much background and then protracting where some of these lives go. What I had to figure out is a device, a story, that can keep the end of it and the beginning – it is a prequel and a sequel. Starts in 1988… it actually starts on the first day after the end of the movie [in 1995] with Val Kilmer trying to get out of
Los Angeles. He’s wounded and half delirious. Then it goes back to 1988 and they’re very different people. They’re not the people they are in the movie. It’s the events of 1988 that made them into the people they are in the movie. So the De Niro character, Neil McCauley, is deep into a relationship with a woman, he has a stepdaughter. He has all these attachments. Then what happens in 2000 takes us into a whole different world, transnational organized crime and Ciudad del Este, which is a free trade zone in South America and Southeast Asia.” Previous rumours have suggested filming aims to begin before the end of the year; either way, it’s certainly Mann’s next project and follows in the wake of “Ferrari” which flopped at the
box office despite good reviews.