Michael B. Jordan, Austin Butler-led 'Miami Vice' Reboot Is Official

Yep, that new Miami Vice remake is definitely coming. And it looks like Michael B. Jordan and Austin Butler will be the leads now that those pesky contracts have reportedly been signed.

According to a Deadline report, Oscar-winner Jordan and Oscar nominee Butler will take on the roles of Miami detectives Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs, played by Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas in the ’80s TV show. Created by Anthony Yerkovich, Heat director Michael Mann was the executive producer. He crafted the visual personality of the show, which became a cultural phenomenon due to the good looks of its actors, its gritty storylines, and its style aesthetic, which borrowed from feature films.

The movie, which has been renamed Miami ’85, will exist in the 80s Vice ecosystem to take advantage of the sensibility that made the show so popular. It will be based on the show’s pilot and first season, which first aired in 1984.

In the pilot, Tubbs is a New York City detective who heads to Miami to find the drug lord, Calderone, who murdered his brother. In doing so, he links up with Crockett, and the rest is TV history.

Director Joseph Kozinski is on board as the movie’s director, and he’s shown an aptitude for flashy filmmaking, helming both Top Gun: Maverick and F1. While both of those movies were hits with audiences and at the box office, Miami Vice is a much darker and more cynical project than those crowdpleasers.

Though it may be viewed by some as just pretty boys running around in fast cars sporting the era’s pastel suits, the constant theme running through the show was how little people can be trusted, especially when money and power are involved.

Filmmakers appear to have noted that, as Nightcrawler screenwriter Dan Gilroy is writing the script.

Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell starred in a 2006 remake directed by Mann. Though it wasn’t well-received critically, at the time, it made over $160M at the box office and is now considered a cult classic.

Miami Vice ’87 will be shot in IMAX and already has a release date of August 6, 2027, so you can expect to see Jordan and Butler on the streets of Miami soon. No other casting has been announced, but it will be interesting to see who is cast as favorite characters like Det. Trudy Joplin (aka Big Booty Trudy) played by Olivia Brown, Det. Gina Calabrese, played by Saundra Santiago, and Lt. Martin Castillo, played by Edward James Olmos.

Johnson weighed in on the reboot not too long ago.

“I didn’t hear the show, but there was a Joe Rogan show on not too long ago. A friend of mine told me he had heard it,” he told Collider in 2024. “Apparently, he and somebody else were singing my praises about how Sonny Crockett was the greatest character of all time, and there hasn’t been anyone before or since that has filled those shoes. I’m not saying that, that’s Joe Rogan and somebody else.”

Johnson added, “I feel that way about the period of time and the texture of the ’80s. It’s different now. It’s hard. It could be done. I have a plan for it, but there are so many people with their thumbs in the pie now and so many iterations that it’s hard to cut through all of that and really find the gem we found back then.”

See social media’s reaction to the 80s classic returning below.