Copyright law gives authors a way to take back work they signed away long ago, but only if they wrote it as authors rather than as hired hands. That line now runs through Heat, the crime epic Michael Mann wrote, produced and directed, and it puts ownership of the Al Pacino and Robert De Niro classic in front of a judge just as its prequel heads into production.

As Deadline first reported, New Regency, the company run by Yariv Milchan, has taken Mann to federal court, asking it to declare the termination notices he served this year “defective and invalid.” Its case is that Mann wrote the Heat screenplay as a work for hire, which would leave the three notices without effect. “Regency still holds the rights to the Heat Screenplay,” the complaint states. “As a result of its rights in and to the Screenplay, Regency owns the film, television, and other rights in the Heat film.”

Mann’s side frames the dispute as one about authorship that runs deeper than the 1995 film. A spokesman said the filing “has to do with original and personal writing Michael Mann did on multiple screenplays during the 1980s and which evolved into the iconic 1995 film Heat.” Part of that lineage is on screen: Mann had already shot a version of the story as L.A. Takedown, a 1989 television film made as an NBC pilot that became the basis for Heat.

Beyond some contractual rights that reverted to him under the WGA Basic Agreement, Mann maintains that a 1988 oral agreement between himself and two of his loan-out companies assigned him core Heat rights as an independent author. “After 40 years Michael Mann is exercising the right of authors to reclaim their work and in this case Michael Mann’s original creation,” the spokesman said, adding that his team will “vigorously defend this action” and is “confident that the courts will vindicate Michael Mann’s statutory rights under the Copyright Act.”

New Regency, founded in 1991, argues the stakes run forward as well as back. According to its 20-page complaint for declaratory relief, the notices, if given effect, “would purport to strip Regency, beginning in 2028, of rights it has held for more than three decades,” clouding its title to the screenplay and “jeopardizing its ability to develop, finance, and license works derived from it.”

Mann’s team says the case is “unrelated to production of Heat 2,” which begins shooting on January 19. Mann directs the prequel from his own script, adapted from the 2022 bestselling novel he wrote with Meg Gardiner, with Leonardo DiCaprio, Christian Bale, Adam Driver, Stephen Graham and Jason Clarke in the cast.

New Regency’s filing complicates that separation. It says certain provisions of the agreements that Mann and Regency each signed with Amazon over Heat 2 “depend on the outcome of this litigation,” so the prequel goes before cameras with part of its paperwork riding on a court’s reading of who wrote the original.

Tags: Robert De Niro, amazon, Al Pacino, Michael Mann, Heat, copyright, Heat 2

Who owns Heat? New Regency sues director Michael Mann, calling his script work for hire

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