Heads Up, Mann Fan(n)s, the ‘Blackhat’ Director‘s Cut Is Coming to FX

As currently working American directors of action cinema go, you can‘t do a whole lot better than Michael Mann. And in Mann’s filmography, you can‘t do a whole lot better than Heat. His 1995 magnum opus is a gem of committed masculine performance, from the robbers’ finely tailored robbin’ suits to the concluding note of man-to-man camaraderie. And in between the hyper-masc displays of honor and strength, Mann stages some of the most technically accomplished set pieces of his career, all but putting the audience’s nerves through a paper shredder. Heat will get a full director’s cut set for release tomorrow (though the changes will be mostly limited to image processing), but today brings the news that another Mann film is taking on a second life.

The Playlist notes that the director’s cut of Blackhat, Mann’s somewhat polarizing techno-thriller featuring Chris Hemsworth from a couple years back, will play on FX tomorrow (Tuesday, May 9) at 7PM. This will mark the broadcast premiere of the film’s complete and unexpurgated version, though the full Blackhat director‘s cut originally played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in February 2016, where reports indicated that the changes made to the film were minor. But even so, a new version of a Mann film is a new version of a Mann film. Hopefully the expanded runtime allows for more highly specialized jargon about the ins and outs of hacking.

A big week for Mann Fanns, as they’re called. But as he fine-tunes Heat and Blackhat, the question of when we can expect an original feature from the director persists. Movement remains slow on his Enzo Ferrari biopic, but hopefully we’ll get an update on the film scheduled for a 2019 release.