Legendary director has co-written a sequel to the 1995 film as a novel
'Heat' is widely regarded as one of the greatest action films of all time and briefly caused world peace to break out when it was released in 1995, and now writer-director Michael Mann wants to make a sequel.
Speaking to Empire Magazine, the auteur said that his upcoming novel 'Heat 2' is "totally planned to be a movie."
Despite making a return to television as executive producer and director of the pilot for 'Tokyo Vice', Mann doesn't see the sequel working on the small screen.
"Is it a modest movie? No. Is it a very expensive series? No - it’s going to be one large movie," Mann teased.
Stars Robert De Niro and Val Kilmer would not be able to reprise their roles owing to their age ("I love those guys, but they’d have to be six years younger than they were in 'Heat' he said) but Mann is confident the film would succeed.
“It (the film) sustained in culture - it’s known," he posited.
"I could delude myself into thinking that the whole world is familiar with it, but when you check out its prominence in home video for over 20 years, this thing really has legs. People are still watching it, people are still talking about it, it's a brand."
"It’s kind of a 'Heat', universe, in a way. And that certainly justifies a very large ambitious movie.”
'Heat' was released in 1995 to a modestly strong box office performance and bafflingly, zero Oscar nominations, but the film has endured as perhaps Michael Mann's opus.
The film is being released in 4K for the first time later this year, which will give us the chance to watch the bank robbery scene in crystal clear definition and sound.
The novel is due for release on August 18th, and Mann said he was excited to explore the crime saga on the page.
"The ability to which you can deep-dive into the internal world is fascinating, and you can do that best in a novel," he said of the novel-writing process.
"I try to evoke that experience in the films I make, to locate the audience within the internal world of a character. The novel form allows me an even greater arena."
Mann has been absent from the world of cinema since his techno-thriller 'Blackhat' in 2015, but the Oscar-nominated director is gearing up to film a biopic about Italian car maker Enzo Ferrari.
Adam Driver has been tapped to star as Enzo Ferrari, and the prospect of one of Hollywood's current great leading men teaming up with an icon of cinema is sure to get any film fans engine revving.