Michael Mann’s Heat 2 is a crime novel, but was almost a video game
polygon.comDirector Michael Mann is releasing a sequel to Heat, his explosive 1995 crime-thriller starring Al Pacino as eccentric police detective Vincent Hanna and Robert De Niro as his career-obsessive counterpart, bank robber Neil McCauley. The sequel to that tinnitus-inducing bank-heist film will arrive this summer in the form of a book, Heat 2: A Novel, which Mann co-wrote with prolific thriller author Meg Gardiner.
Heat 2 will tell the “before and after” story of the film’s primary characters, according to a trailer for the book, and promises a “deep dive” into Hanna’s life in Chicago six years prior to the events of Heat. Mann told Deadline, “There was always a rich history or back-story about the events in these people’s lives before 1995 inHeat and projection of where their lives would take them after.”
Expect a similar exploration into McCauley’s background and that of his accomplice, Chris Shiherlis, who was played by Val Kilmer in the film. Heat 2 will begin in the immediate aftermath of Heat’s botched bank robbery, with a wounded Shiherlis trying to escape Los Angeles. Deadline’s write-up of the plot of Heat 2 points to a global thriller, with a story spanning 12 years of crime drama that ping-pongs from Taiwan to Mexico to LA to Southeast Asia.
Mann previously spoke of a Heat prequel back in 2016. He established the Michael Mann Books imprint then, with the intention to plumb his television and film creations for new novels. Publisher William Morrow will make good on that long gestating plan on Aug. 9, when it releases Heat 2: A Novel.
But Mann had eyes on a Heat sequel/prequel much earlier than 2016. And his Heat successor was once conceived to arrive as a video game, developed by Borderlands studio Gearbox Software.
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