Everything we know about UNREALISED MICHAEL MANN PROJECTS *UPDATED*
Editor’s Note: This is a column from one of the many incredible, insightful and obsessive members of the growing One Heat Minute crew - the man I know as C.K. In the OHM community, C.K. is the resident historian and online chronicler of Michael Mann productions. After sharing this work on the exclusive OHM Discord channel, I insisted that C.K. allow me to publish his investigations here.
-Blake Howard
From 1981 to 2023, Michael Mann only made 12 feature films, with the gap between each film widening. However, over these three decades, Mann’s name has been attached to a myriad of fascinating projects. The range of these projects is startling - anywhere from a contemporary media mogul drama to a medieval archer story and everything in between. Below is a list of these projects with brief details, including when they were announced and if any news followed their announcements. There are likely even more films than mentioned here, and one can hope we, as an audience, get to see some of these one day.
1980s:
1980/2017 - A drama about the Golden Triangle, Mann researched Laos, Thailand and Burma while observing and speaking to the DEA, CIA, Chinese military and local pirates for research. The idea briefly resurfaced in 2017 when he mentioned the project to AFP as something he was returning to.
1990s:
1993 - Biopic about Hollywood private detective Anthony Pellicano, who went to jail after his crimes were exposed.
The mid-1990s - Biopic about Sarkis Soghanalian, a 350-pound Armenian arms merchant out of Lebanon. Mann was working on the script with Eric Roth and regularly speaking to Lowell Bergman about the events when he found out about the story behind The Insider. So he opted to make the latter instead.
1993-1995 - James Dean biopic with Leonardo DiCaprio for Warner Bros. Mann screen tested DiCaprio, but they decided he was too young and chose to do Heat instead.
1999 - Gates of Hell, which is the same story as 300. Universal bought it with George Clooney attached, and numerous A-List actors also tried to get themselves attached. David Self had written the latest version of the screenplay.
The late 1990s - The Inside Man with Leonardo DiCaprio, a story about corruption within the NYPD union. Also, set up at Disney through Mann’s deal.
A film adaptation of House of Cards, starring Al Pacino and written by Eric Roth. Roth later presented the project to David Fincher for the eventual Netflix series.
The late 1990s through early 2000s - The Aviator. The film was initially set up at Disney but then bought in turnaround from New Line. Mann was exhausted after filming Ali and wanted to make something looser and less fact-based, and opted to do Collateral instead while offering The Aviator to Martin Scorsese.
2000s:
The early 2000s/2017-2019 - Comanche, the true story behind the events of The Searcher. In a leaked Sony email, Michael De Luca (who would work with Mann later on Hue 1968) compared The Revenant to Comanche and said it’d be his dream to make the film one day. Eric Roth wrote it for Michael Mann in the early 2000s; Mann mentioned the project twice in 2017 - once in January with Deadline and then in October Lyon Film Festival and finally in 2019 to AFP.
The 2000s - Fortune’s Fools, a Universal and Working Title drama, centred around five cops who steal a winning lottery ticket from a drug dealer. The list of directors rotated over several years, and the film never materialised.
2000 - A version of Shooter, to have starred Brad Pitt as a sniper forced to come out of retirement. This was eventually made with Mark Wahlberg and directed by Antoine Fuqua.
2000 - A drug trade drama to be written by Shane Salerno. Salerno ended up partnering with Mann decades later to launch Michael Mann Books.
2001 - Biopic about Caesar’s rise to power, written by John Orloff and to have been produced by Tom Hanks. The project was to be shopped at Disney. Ten years later, Orloff remarked he was still trying to get the project made with a different director.
2003 - Arms and the Man, a Peter Landesman scripted drama about Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer named the Merchant of Death for Universal. Landesman had mentioned Mann’s long interest in shooting in the former Soviet Union / Middle East. Bout, who was also the inspiration for Nicolas Cage in the drama Lord of War, was eventually caught by the DEA in 2010 and traded in 2022 for WNBA player Brittney Griner. Despite the project never materialising, Mann still followed real-life events. For example, Mann mentioned the DEA agents responsible for capturing Bout in a foreword for his imprint’s book Hunting LeRoux. He later thanked the same agents in his afterword of Heat 2.
2003 - The Few is the true story of American pilot Billy Fiske, who defied neutrality to help Britain fight the Germans in the early days of World War 2. The film would have starred Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer for Paramount, with a script by John Logan. The project never materialised.
2003 - Tonight, He Comes, which eventually became Hancock. Mann worked with Vince Gilligan on script rewrites before the project changed hands and was ultimately directed by Peter Berg. Mann still received producing credit on the film and even appears as a marketing executive in one scene.
2006 - Untitled Hollywood Fixer film - Followed a Hollywood fixer in the 1930s. To have started Leonardo DiCaprio. It was at New Line, but the studio needed to be more comfortable with the $120 million budget. So they offered a lower amount, but Mann rejected it, and the film never materialised.
2006 - An adaptation of For Whom the Bell Tolls - to have potentially started Leonardo DiCaprio for Warner Bros. The project was briefly re-mentioned in 2010. However, in a 2012 DGA interview, Mann said he gave up the project when he realised he couldn’t find a way to make it fresh and that developing the Robert Capa biopic grew out of his general interest in the Spanish Civil War.
2007 - Empire - a script by John Logan about a contemporary media mogul, set to have starred Will Smith for Columbia. No details were revealed about the project.
2007 - Alexander Litivenko biopic - Set up at Columbia and was racing against a similar project from Johnny Depp.
2007 - Frankie Machine - a film about a mobster who comes out of retirement. The film was to star Robert DeNiro. Set up at Paramount, Mann hired Alex Tse to rewrite the movie, but the project changed hands several times.
2009 - Waiting for Robert Capa biopic - Set up at Columbia, who purchased the rights to a book around the subject. After being impressed by his play Jerusalem, Mann hired Jez Buttersworth to write the screenplay. There were conflicting rumours about Andrew Garfield, Gemma Arterton, and Eva Green being attached, although the former was likely linked to a different film around the same subject. Unfortunately, the film never materialised, and Mann commented in 2015 that the project was dead.
2009 - Damage Control, a drama that was to have been made after Public Enemies and starring Jamie Foxx as a spin doctor. Foxx mentioned the film had a long development cycle; Ann Biderman said spending two years working with Mann on a movie set in the world of sports before working on Public Enemies; it’s possible this was another version of the story. The film didn’t have any other news after the initial announcement.
2010s:
2010 - The Big Tuna - a biopic about the 1950s Chicago mob. Mann hired Sheldon Turner to write the script. The project was re-mentioned in 2016 as a novelisation with an eventual film tie-in under Mann’s imprint.
2010 - Agincourt is a medieval film about an archer who fights in the Battle of Agincourt based on Bernard Cornwell’s book. Mann had always been fascinated by the period. In 2013, he hired Stuart Hazeldine to write a script draft. In 2015, Mann said the film was still being written and a complex project to materialise. Hazeldine mentioned in 2022 that he was no longer attached to the project and that it was being developed as a series, the last he had heard.
2011 - Gold - the true story of a major scandal around natural resources in Indonesia. Paul Haggis presented the project to Mann as a writing spec, but he sparked the material. The film ended up moving to Spike Lee then was eventually made by Stephen Gaghan.
2011 - Go Like Hell - the 1996 Le Mans race story. Mann hired the Butterworth brothers (Jez had already worked on Waiting for Robert Capa), but the film became more expensive as Mann also wanted to focus on the Italian pit crew. Mann was listed as the final producer of Ford v Ferrari's final version.
2012 - Untitled Sci-Fi Project - This has come up here and there in random interviews. Mann spoke about it in a DGA profile in 2012, at the 2016 retrospective screening in New York and 2017 interviews for Deadline and France.
2012 - The Big Stone Grid - a cop thriller set in LA, written by S. Craig Zahler and set up at Sony. No news ended up following the initial announcement.
2012 - The Tam - A film about pirates set on the South China Sea, to have been co-written by Alex Tse. This may reference Batam, where part of Heat 2 was set in Indonesia. In a NY Times profile of Mann in 2022, his research trip for the film was mentioned.
2016 - Hue 1968 - An adaptation of Mark Bowden’s non-fiction book about the Battle of Hue. Mann partnered with Mike DeLuca, who had worked on The Aviator. The project was brought to FX for a mini-series commitment. Mann had written several scripts and sought permission to film in Vietnam but was denied. Instead, set construction began in Thailand and The Philippines. On Marc Maron’s podcast, Mann mentioned that due to the cost of the show and the Fox / Disney merger, the project never got a formal green light despite being very close to happening.
2019 - An adaptation of Hunting Le Roux, about the real-life DEA hunt of Rhodesian hacker Paul LeRoux. This was the first novel Mann published via his imprint, Michael Mann Books. Mann said there were “definite” plans to turn the story into a film, but that’s all he revealed.