Heat director Michael Mann says the first draft of his sequel script is finished and handed in to Warner Bros.

Heat 2 is one step closer to hitting our screens. The movie has been in the works since April 2023, but director Michael Mann has revealed that he's now finished the first draft of the script.

"I just finished the screenplay and handed in the first draft," Mann said in a new interview with Vulture. "In this case it was Warner Brothers. Any more than that, I can’t talk about. But it’s an exciting project."

No official casting announcements have been made yet, but the rumor mill has been in overdrive since the movie was announced. Reports say Adam Driver is playing career thief Neil McCauley, the character played by Robert De Niro in the original film, while Austin Butler is rumored to be taking on Val Kilmer's role as McCauley's right-hand man Chris Shiherlis.

The new movie will be based on the novel Mann co-wrote with Meg Gardiner, released in 2022, that acts as both a prequel and a sequel to the 1995 crime drama about the cat-and-mouse chase between McCauley and Al Pacino's LAPD detective Vincent Hanna. Alternating between two timelines, the novel tells the story of everything that happens to the movie's principal characters before and after the events of Heat.

""It was a thrill to write it, because I got to go off on some tangents that you would never be able to do when making a motion picture," Mann told GamesRadar+ back in 2023.

While we wait for Heat 2 to arrive on our screens, get up to speed with this year's best upcoming movies with our guide to the biggest movie release dates in 2025.