Hollywood’s usual move with an old cop show is to drag it into the present. Michael Mann did exactly that when he took his own Miami Vice to the big screen with Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, trading pastel suits for digital grit. Universal’s Miami Vice ’85 is going the other way, and the title is the thesis: Joseph Kosinski’s reboot pins Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs to the moment the series began, and Austin Butler and Michael B. Jordan are now playing them in front of IMAX cameras.

Deadline’s running guide to the project confirms that production is under way, with shots of Jordan in character as Tubbs making the rounds on social media, while Universal’s official first look pairs Butler’s Crockett with Jordan’s Tubbs. The story draws on the NBC pilot, “Brother’s Keeper”, and on the show’s first season, following the two undercover detectives through South Florida’s criminal underbelly.

Around the leads, the ensemble now runs twelve names deep. Alden Ehrenreich was the first to join, followed by Whitney Peak, who plays Lenore Dove in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping. Camila Morrone and Danny Ramirez came next, John Leguizamo will play the villain, and Andrew Schulz, Walton Goggins and André Holland have since boarded. Michael Irby has been cast as Lt. Lou Rodriguez, and Haley Lu Richardson is the most recent addition.

Irby’s role is the clearest sign of how literal that first-season brief is. On television, Rodriguez was Crockett’s first boss, played by Gregory Sierra, and the character was killed off in the fourth episode, clearing the way for Edward James Olmos’s Lt. Martin Castillo to run the squad for the rest of the series. A film that bothers to cast Rodriguez is adapting the show’s opening chapter, not its legend.

The creative team leans the same way. Kosinski arrives from Top Gun: Maverick, the legacy sequel that sold nostalgia as large-format spectacle, and Dan Gilroy, the writer-director of Nightcrawler, rewrote a first-draft script by Eric Warren Singer. Dylan Clark produces with Kosinski. The script is based on characters created by Anthony Yerkovich, from the series Yerkovich executive-produced with Mann, and Universal’s EVP of production development Sara Scott and creative executive Christina Hoffrogge are overseeing the project for the studio.

The calendar has already shifted once. Universal first set Miami Vice ’85 for August 6, 2027, before moving it to May 19, 2028.

The pilot it is rebuilding aired on NBC in September 1984. If the new date holds, Crockett and Tubbs will return to cinemas almost 44 years later, in a film whose whole bet is that the decade the show once defined as modern now plays as a period piece.

Tags: production-start, Austin Butler, Joseph Kosinski, Michael B. Jordan, Universal Pictures, Miami Vice ’85

Miami Vice ’85 is shooting, and Kosinski is rebuilding the 1984 pilot around Butler and Jordan

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