Call it the GTA 6 movie, but Miami Vice was wearing the suit before Grand Theft Auto stole the car. With Michael B. Jordan and Austin Butler leading Miami Vice ’85, Hollywood is returning to the neon-soaked crime world that made pastel colored jackets look (almost) dangerous. Meanwhile, GTA 6 is taking players back to Vice City, where they get to pull the trigger instead of watching someone else do it. GTA is considered a direct ripoff of the 80s TV show, but the rivalry begs the question: can Miami Vice reclaim its swagger, or has the game already stolen the show?
Don Johnson’s Sonny Crockett and Philip Michael Thomas’s Rico Tubbs made undercover police work look impossibly stylish. Jackets had attitude. A glance could carry a threat. The sunshine seemed capable of hiding anything. You watched the danger, then caught yourself wanting the wardrobe.
And the music! The pilot’s nighttime drive to Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight” remains the kind of sequence that makes you understand why people remember television with their whole bodies. The road, the faces, the gathering tension: an ordinary screen suddenly felt enormous.
Years later, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City arrived in 2002 and offered another way into an intoxicating 1980s crime fantasy. Rockstar’s own description celebrates big hair, excess, and pastel suits. If you had watched Miami Vice, those ingredients came with a powerful sense of recognition.
The soundtrack helped carry that world across generations, too. Vice City’s ’80s radio stations gave younger players a taste for music older listeners already knew by heart. Apparently, the quickest way to get someone to appreciate the music their parents loved was to let them steal a car with it playing.
That does not make Vice City a licensed Miami Vice adaptation. It makes the comparison irresistible. Look at the shared visual vocabulary: waterfront glamour, expensive-looking trouble, music pouring through the streets, and men whose clothing suggests they have never worried about a quiet evening.
The delicious reversal was who held the wheel. Miami Vice followed undercover detectives moving through the criminal world. Vice City let you pursue your own rise through it. Suddenly, you could turn down a side street, abandon the plan, and discover exactly how much chaos your evening could accommodate.
Then came another turn of the wheel: Michael Mann’s 2006 Miami Vice movie, starring Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx. Could Vice City’s 2002 arrival have helped revive interest in the world that made Crockett and Tubbs icons? It is an intriguing possibility, although the sequence of releases does not prove the game inspired the film. Contemporary accounts credit Foxx with pitching the movie idea to Mann. Still, the game may have helped keep that Miami crime fantasy alive for a younger audience before Hollywood put it back on the big screen.
Mann’s film took a contemporary route rather than throwing an ’80s costume party. That makes Miami Vice ’85 an especially juicy next chapter: the franchise is returning to its period roots after the game spent years giving players their own way into that world.
Now GTA VI is returning to Vice City and expanding the action across the fictional state of Leonida. Rockstar puts Jason and Lucia at the center of a criminal conspiracy. This is a modern setting, while Miami Vice ’85 heads back to the mid-1980s. They are approaching the same sunlit nightmare from different decades—and inviting us to enjoy opposite sides of the law.
The release calendar gives Rockstar the first move. GTA VI is currently scheduled for November 19, 2026. Universal lists Miami Vice ’85 for May 19, 2028. That leaves room for a fascinating possibility: by the time the movie arrives, audiences may already have spent countless evenings roaming a digital Vice City.
Could the film benefit from that renewed appetite for Miami crime stories? Absolutely, as an editorial possibility. Could the game make a two-hour movie feel restrictive? Also possible. But there is no established evidence here that Universal planned its film around GTA VI. The cultural overlap is the story; a secret marketing strategy would require proof.
The movie does have a formidable answer. Michael B. Jordan takes on Tubbs, Austin Butler plays Crockett, and Joseph Kosinski—the director behind Top Gun: Maverick and F1—is directing. The announced approach draws from the original pilot and first season, with filming planned for IMAX. Those are promising ingredients for a return that needs to feel enormous.
Still, casting stars and reviving a wardrobe cannot manufacture the old electricity. Jordan and Butler need the partnership to crackle. The city needs to seduce. The danger needs consequences. I want to feel that something precious could disappear before the next song finishes.
GTA 6 has the advantage of freedom. A great film has the power of precision: one devastating cut, one performance that holds you still, one perfectly chosen piece of music arriving when you have nowhere to hide. Watching can be every bit as consuming as playing when the people on screen make you care.
So the chicken-or-the-egg question comes with a twist. Miami Vice reached television before Vice City reached consoles. But the new movie will enter a world where some viewers recognize this fantasy first through a controller. For them, Crockett and Tubbs may look like newcomers to a place they already know.
For me, the stakes are personal. I used to rush home every Friday to watch the original Miami Vice, and for an hour the outside world stopped. Looking back, what a night to commandeer: Friday, when we were supposed to be going out. Yet we gladly let the weekend wait while Crockett and Tubbs took us somewhere more exciting.
That is what Miami Vice ’85 needs to recapture—the power to make everything else wait. Give the suits a pulse. Make the partnership crackle. Remind the generation raised on Vice City why some of us fell for this world before we ever picked up a controller.
The game can give me an entire city. The movie has to make me forget the room I’m sitting in.
Do that, and my Friday night belongs to Miami Vice again.
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