I'd bet on Miami Vice '85 making $600 million — even though the last reboot tanked

Let me put the number on the table first. Miami Vice '85 — Joseph Kosinski's period reboot of the NBC series, with Michael B. Jordan as Rico Tubbs and Austin Butler as Sonny Crockett — starts shooting in November in New York and Miami, and opens on May 19, 2028. I think it makes $600 million worldwide, and I don't think that's even a brave prediction. It's just Kosinski's recent floor.

His last two movies were Top Gun: Maverick ($1.5 billion worldwide) and F1 (about $630 million, Apple's biggest theatrical release ever). Both were adult-skewing, practically shot, IMAX-first spectacles sold on craft and movie-star wattage rather than on a cinematic universe. Miami Vice '85 is assembled from the identical kit: shot for IMAX, photographed by Kosinski's Oscar-winning regular Claudio Miranda, written by Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawler) from earlier drafts by Maverick co-writer Eric Warren Singer, produced by Kosinski and Dylan Clark. The difference is that this time the brand recognition comes built in: five seasons on NBC, 20 Emmy nominations, and a show that defined how an entire decade dressed.

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The case, itemized

• The cast got absurd in about three weeks. September alone added Walton Goggins, John Leguizamo as the villain, and Andrew Schulz, joining Jordan, Butler, Alden Ehrenreich, Whitney Peak, Camila Morrone, and Danny Ramirez. That's an ensemble built for a poster, and posters sell period crime movies.
• The date move is the tell. Universal originally dated the film for August 6, 2027, then pushed it to May 19, 2028. Part of that is simple arithmetic — cameras roll in November 2026, and August 2027 was never realistic. But studios park troubled movies in the fall. They put summer-openers in mid-May. Maverick launched from the same late-May corridor, and Universal moving Miami Vice '85 there is the studio saying out loud what it thinks it has.
• The blessing of the elders. Series creator Anthony Yerkovich and Michael Mann are both executive producers. Kosinski spent 2025 courting Mann personally, telling Deadline's Behind the Lens podcast:

"I would hope to get Michael involved in some way for sure."

— Joseph Kosinski, Behind the Lens, December 2025

He got him. And before the leads even closed their deals, Kosinski was openly rooting for them: "If it ends up being those two, I'd be very lucky."

About that last reboot

Yes, Michael Mann's own 2006 Miami Vice movie made about $164 million worldwide on a budget north of $135 million, with a famously miserable hurricane-battered shoot and reviews that took 15 years to turn into a cult reappraisal. But the 2006 film is a misleading precedent, because it refused to do the one thing audiences wanted: it stripped out the pastels, the neon, and the 1980s entirely, delivering digital-video nihilism in place of nostalgia. Kosinski's version is titled '85, draws from the show's pilot and first season, and is being built around the exact mid-80s texture Mann once invented and then declined to revisit. The 2006 movie didn't prove the brand is weak. It proved the brand without its decade is weak.

Mann's 2006 reboot removed the '80s from Miami Vice and made $164 million. Kosinski's version puts the '80s in the title.

Where I could be wrong

Fairness requires the other column. Neither Jordan nor Butler has opened a non-franchise movie to blockbuster numbers on his own name; F1 had Brad Pitt and a globally pre-sold sport, while a 40-year-old cop show means nothing to most moviegoers under 35. R-leaning crime dramas are not four-quadrant, and May 2028 will not be an empty month. If Miami Vice '85 lands at $350 million, that's the version of events where Kosinski's formula turns out to need either a legacy sequel or a real-world sport attached, and star-plus-craft alone wasn't enough. I'd still take the over. The last time Universal gave Kosinski's instincts this much runway, the result played in theaters for a year.

Previously we wrote: Two Disney originals already flopped on Thanksgiving — Hexed is next, from a director of one of them