IT’S THE LITTLE details that matter the most. The opening moments of Heat, Michael Mann’s 1995 masterpiece, glide along as master robber Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) moves wordlessly and single-mindedly through a hospital to hijack a parked ambulance. Initially, the vehicle's purpose is unknown, but it soon becomes a foundational part of an armored truck robbery staged by McCauley and his crew of career criminals. But the ambulance isn’t what really matters in this sequence. For many, including The Ringer's editorial director Chris Ryan, one of the film’s most impactful moments is the hum of a Peterbilt truck. “I just remember that truck rumbling before they let it go, and being like, ‘What is that sound?’” Ryan tells Men’s Health. “I’ve never heard that sound before.”
Now, thirty years later, Heat remains one of the most beloved movies in pop culture history, inspiring countless works in its afterburn. There are entire podcast series dedicated to chronicling its greatness, not to mention the number of creative works that are, directly or otherwise, indebted to it. It’s become a shorthand for a particular type of crime thriller, one in which two opposing sides of the law—in this case, De Niro’s McCauley and LAPD lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino)—embark on a series of events which set the pair on a collision course for one another, learning along the way that they’ve got a lot in common.
Heat is Mann’s fifth directorial effort, but its origins trace back to the 1970s. The filmmaker had heard a story from Chicago detective Chuck Adamson about how he’d sat down with a real-life career criminal named Neil McCauley. Per Adamson’s tale, the pair had a conversation over a cup of coffee where they exchanged ideas about their respective professions, with Adamson eventually telling McCauley that if the robberies didn’t stop, their next meeting might not be so friendly. Mann filed the story away and used it as inspiration for an NBC television series pilot called L.A. Takedown. When the show didn’t make it to series, he reimagined it as a made-for-TV movie, which aired in August 1989.
Mann couldn’t let the idea go. In 1994, he refashioned Takedown into Heat. He likened the process to composing a song, stating that he’d “charted the film out like a 2 hr 45 min piece of music, so I'd know where to be smooth, where not to be smooth, where to be staccato, where to use a pulse like a heartbeat.” Soon after reworking the script, De Niro and Pacino joined the production as Mann’s first choices for McCauley and Hanna. The reunion marked the first film the pair had made together since The Godfather Part II; the two—arguably the best actors of their generation—starring in another film together was an event unto itself. Upon its release, Heat received generally strong reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half stars out of four, stating that Mann’s “writing and direction elevate this material.”
For those who saw Heat, it was love at first sight. “I knew it was my favorite movie as soon as it was over,” Ryan says. “It hit me at the exact right point in my life where I was ready to be challenged, but also still wanted to see something with cops and robbers, guns and car chases, and all the things that you grow up on as a young, male film watcher … I attached to it immediately.”
It was a similar experience for film journalist Blake Howard.
“I was at a friend's house… his sister was a notorious double-taper and would record VHS that she rented from the video store,” he recalls. “I walked down the stairs, and just in my periphery, I catch something through her doorway…I saw [Val] Kilmer and De Niro in hockey masks and that gigantic green truck. I stood there frozen until the getaway.” As the creator of the One Heat Minute Podcast, Howard has watched and rewatched Heat on a particularly granular level—i.e., one minute at a time, in case you didn’t get the gist from the title of the show. The series spanned over 170 episodes, and featured filmmaker guests like Joe Lynch, Guillermo Del Toro, and Mann himself. Revisiting the film so often became “comforting,” Howard says. He continues: “And then what happened is that it just never diminished.”
Ryan is on the record describing a similar feeling. Multi-hyphenate media personality Bill Simmons has said that the genesis of The Ringer’s smash-hit podcast The Rewatchables came from a casual conversation he and Ryan had in December 2015 about the film. Simmons joked that every 100th episode of The Rewatchables would be another conversation about the film; Heat has since been the subject of three different installments of the podcast. The most recent Heat episode of The Rewatchables pulled off the coup of landing Mann as a guest alongside Ryan and Simmons. “We’ve talked about this movie more than any other on The Rewatchables, and it’s because you can watch it for the 50th time and still find things you didn’t notice before,” Ryan says. “When you can keep approaching it that way, it’s the mark of a truly great film.”
“There’s a momentum to it,” film critic Katie Walsh says. “[Mann’s movies] usually start in motion, and then end in motion. You get swept into it, so you’re on this ride, and you feel like you’re in really good hands.” Walsh and Howard (who co-hosted a podcast about Mann’s 2006 Miami Vice movie called Miami Nice) both spoke about going to screenings and seeing movies they were disappointed in, and finding a reprieve in something as masterful as Heat. “Sometimes you just want to be in a world that is impeccably made,” she adds. “Because it’s such a dense movie, there are things you forget about. On different watches, you pick up on different things.”
Howard agrees: “Every time you revisit it, it just never disappoints you.”
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REWATCHABILITY HAS UNDOUBTLY played a role in keeping Heat around in the cultural consciousness, but the film has lived on through its creative impact. “You know that line about how the Velvet Underground didn’t have that many fans, but everyone who heard the Velvet Underground started a band?” Ryan asks. “It’s the kind of movie that makes people want to make movies … You can see its fingerprints all over everything.”
Christopher Nolan used it as inspiration for The Dark Knight, casting Heat actor William Fichtner as a bank manager during the film’s tense opening heist sequence. The best-selling video game Grand Theft Auto V’s “Blitz Play” mission features a robbery in which the crew knocks over an armored car with a truck. Lester Crest, the heist planner in GTA V, resembles Kelso (Tom Sizemore), and the playable protagonist Michael De Santa mimics Neil sartorially, down to a particular penchant for suiting. Actor Adam Scott described a restaurant sit-down between Mark Scout and Helena Eagan in season 2 of Severance as the series’s “Heat scene.”
“Part of why [we] love Heat, Manhunter, and Thief is because they’re obsessed with process and execution,” Mickey Down & Konrad Kay, the creators, writers, directors, and executive producers of HBO’s Industry, told MH in an e-mail.
The pair is candid about the film and Mann’s influence, going so far as to quote Tom Sizemore’s iconic “the action is the juice” during a critical season 3 episode. “Show your work at all points. How do you open a safe? How do you case a crime scene? Worse filmmakers can’t be bothered with the painstaking detail, research, and application you need to render that stuff on film and make it feel authentic.”
The obsessive focus and verisimilitude of Heat (unsurprisingly) made its way into Industry. “We tried to bring that attention to detail to the trading floor, and bring some of that punchy, jargon-heavy dialogue along with it.” The pair went on to describe the relationship between McCauley and Hanna as “a romance between two men damned by their own commitment to being singularly great at what they do. Hanna holds McCauley’s hand as he dies because he’s losing the one person in the film who understands him.” That dynamic is reflected in many of the characters across Industry, including as the foundation of the relationship between Harper Stern (Myha’la) and Eric Tao (Ken Leung), who are two equally obsessed workaholics.
In fact, obsession is present across the director’s work. “Every single one of Mann’s movies is about perfectionism, being obsessed, workaholism, and [the idea of] Can you have a life while also being at the height of your game?” Walsh says. “You have to be completely obsessed and devoted to get a fricking movie made and to get a movie of this scale and scope as precisely as he does.”
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MANN WILL REPORTEDLY dive back into another massive-scale project. As it turns out, the director is particularly obsessive about this story. In 2022, at the tail end of the pandemic, Mann and co-author Meg Gardiner published Heat 2. Initially announced in 2016, the book functions as both a sequel and a prequel, moving back and forth throughout time as both Hanna and McCauley earn their stripes in 1988 Chicago. Meanwhile, after escaping Los Angeles in 1995, Chris Shiherlis (Kilmer) hides in Mexico as he’s pursued by Hanna. The novel is expansive, to say the least, spanning several continents and decades, and therefore felt like a steep hill to climb when adapting it into a film. That’s a factor Down and Kay identified in why the original still resonates. “‘They don’t make ‘em’ like this anymore,’ and in Heat’s case, it’s literally true,” they wrote. “If you could get someone to finance something like this now, there’s very little chance it would be as artful or as considered—frame by frame, sound by sound.”
In recent weeks, however, word is getting out about significant progress being made on making Heat 2 a reality. In October 2025, Amazon-MGM Studios’ United Artists acquired the rights to the film at a $150 million budget, covering Paraguay, Mexicali, Chicago, LA (where it will have a 77-day shoot), and Batam. Oh, and Leonardo DiCaprio confirmed in early December that he will star in the project, calling the original “the great crime noir of my lifetime” before adding, “[Mann] is extraordinary to work with, because there’s nothing that he hasn’t thought of.”
Ryan reacted to the news on a recent podcast, stating, “It’s kind of like finding out God’s real.” The size and scope of a project like this is increasingly more challenging to get made, especially in an era where production budgets and box office returns for films like Sinners or One Battle After Another are scrutinized in a manner that’s closer to a First Take segment than objective business reporting.
That’s not curbing Ryan’s enthusiasm, however. “I am starting to believe,” he says. “For as much as DiCaprio has deference to an older generation of master filmmakers, I don’t think he would do this if he thought it was going to be bad. Him doing it essentially guarantees it’s going to get made, and guarantees that the cast is going to be outstanding…He’s very selective when he goes in front of the press and is like, ‘This is my next movie.’”
Howard is equally energetic. “It’s closer to being made than it’s ever been,” he says. “It’s kind of a tragedy of lost time that now, at 83, Mann is finally getting to do this… I can’t wait to see it, but it’s going to be weird to see. I genuinely think I’ll have to watch it 10 times before I can have a response.”
Regardless of what happens with the sequel, Heat will live on for another thirty years, just as it has for the last thirty. In writing about what they remembered from seeing the film for the first time, Down and Kay describe a litany of moments: “A book about metals. The sound design on the machine guns. McCauley’s suits. I’m talking to an empty telephone. Cherrito’s look at the nosey diner. The way the advertising foil ticker tape falls after the armored car is felled in the first robbery. They’re looking at us. Moby, the shadows, and the landing lights at LAX. Look at me.” These disparate recollections encompass what’s made the movie last, from memes to performance, visuals, sounds, and little grace notes.
All movies are collections of images and sounds that build into a larger whole. For fans of Heat, especially, whether they’ve watched once or a thousand times, if they close their eyes and think about these moments long enough, they all coalesce into something transcendent. It’s almost as if they roar to life, like that one-of-a-kind hum of a truck about to hit an armored car.
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