Much has been made over the years of the fact that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, arguably the most widely acclaimed superhero movie ever made, owes its existence in large part to Michael Mann’s 1995 masterpiece Heat. In fact, Nolan himself has never hidden away from this comparison and openly embraced it. However, the fact this relationship between The Dark Knight and Heat exists implies on the basis of what’s known in science as the principle of microscopic reversibility (i.e. that if a process is true in the forward sense, then its microscopic reverse is true as well) not only that The Dark Knight is Heat with Batman in it, but perhaps it suggests that Heat could be seen as a superhero movie in its own right. 

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