Miami Vice ’85: Alden Ehrenreich Joins Kosinski’s Reboot

Alden Ehrenreich has joined the cast of Miami Vice ’85, the new feature adaptation of the NBC series directed by Joseph Kosinski, with Austin Butler playing Sonny Crockett and Michael B. Jordan as Ricardo Tubbs. Ehrenreich’s role is being kept under wraps for now; filming is expected to begin by the end of 2026, while Universal has set the release for May 19, 2028, after moving it from its previous August 6, 2027 date.

Ehrenreich also arrives at an interesting point in his career: after Solo: A Star Wars Story, he resurfaced with Oppenheimer, Weapons and his Broadway debut in Becky Shaw, which has just earned him a Tony Award. This time, though, there are no faraway galaxies involved: Miami Beach, drug traffickers and probably an industrial quantity of pastel-colored linen should be enough.

Crockett and Tubbs Return to 1985, Where the Brand Is Still Intact

Miami Vice ’85 will not simply bring Crockett and Tubbs into the present day, but will instead recreate Miami in the mid-1980s, leaning into the contrast between glamour and corruption and drawing explicit inspiration from the pilot and first season of the original series. The film will also be shot for IMAX, territory that has become increasingly natural for Kosinski after Top Gun: Maverick and F1. The screenplay is by Dan Gilroy, writer of Nightcrawler and Andor, developed from an earlier draft by Eric Warren Singer; Kosinski is producing alongside Dylan Clark.

The choice of the pilot is anything but accidental. First broadcast in September 1984, it introduced Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas as two cops destined to become icons even before they became an established investigative duo. It also already contained the series’ aesthetic manifesto: Crockett and Tubbs speeding through the night to In the Air Tonight by Phil Collins, in a sequence that treated a pop song almost like a parallel screenplay.

Miami Vice became far more than a cop show: across five seasons, cars, fashion, Art Deco architecture and contemporary music entered the grammar of television itself. Even Jan Hammer’s electronic theme reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1985, not exactly a common achievement for the instrumental theme tune of a series about two narcotics detectives.

From Michael Mann to Vin Diesel: Miami Vice Never Really Went Away

The new film will also be the latest attempt to answer a familiar question: which version of Miami Vice should be brought back to life?

In 2006, Michael Mann himself gave it a try. As executive producer and the main creative force behind the original series, Mann recast Crockett and Tubbs with Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, turning them into much darker figures immersed in global drug trafficking, surveillance and digital cinematography. The film grossed around $164 million against an estimated budget of between $135 million and $150 million and was coolly received at the time, only to be reassessed over the years until it became something of a cult object. Just recently, twenty years after its release, The Guardian revisited it as one of Mann’s strangest and most radical works.

In 2017, NBC instead tried the television route: Vin Diesel and Chris Morgan, already collaborators within the Fast & Furious universe, put a reboot of the series into development. The project, however, ended up on that long Hollywood highway connecting announcements to disappearance without ever passing through any intermediate tollbooths.

After putting Top Gun back in the air, Kosinski will now try to do the same with Ferraris, speedboats and synthesizers, returning to the exact point where the myth was born.