Two separate people filmed Universal’s Miami Vice ’85 from the shore at Port Newark, New Jersey, and sent the footage to Powerboat News. Both shot at night, at distance, on phones.
They found us through Google and social media. We published both.
Powerboat News understands the production moves to Miami after Thanksgiving, and that people connected to it are already concerned about spy photographs and video. On the evidence of New Jersey, they are right to be.
A studio can lock a stage, fence a lot and put security on a dock. On water it has one real tool.
A production can ask the United States Coast Guard to establish a temporary safety zone. That exists to keep the public away from explosions and stunts. It is a safety measure, not a privacy measure, and it does nothing about a camera standing outside it.
Port Newark Was the Easy One
The New Jersey shoot had almost everything in the production’s favour. A working container port with restricted land access, filming after dark in late October, few vantage points, and nobody much around to use them.
It still leaked twice in seven days.
The footage shows what you would expect from that distance: a Scarab running past a floodlit quay, no faces, no dialogue, filmed with modern mobile phones.
Miami Is Not Port Newark
Miami offers the production the opposite of everything Newark gave it.
The city has one of the busiest recreational boating areas in the world. Filming moves there in winter, in daylight, on open water that thousands of private boats use every weekend. The causeways cross directly over it. The condominium towers along the shoreline look straight down onto the water from a height that makes a long lens unnecessary.
When the original series shot in Miami in 1984 and 1985, a bystander watching from a sea wall had no camera at all, or a film camera with 24 exposures and a fortnight’s wait at the chemist.
The gap between seeing something and publishing it was measured in weeks, and almost nobody crossed it.
That gap is now a few seconds, and roughly five billion people are carrying the equipment.
Powerboat News Is Part of This
We published two of these videos this week, and it would be dishonest to write this piece as a bystander.
Both arrived unsolicited.
And that gives us an early clue to how popular this film will be.
Miami Vice ’85 reaches cinemas on 19 May 2028. Joseph Kosinski directs, from a script by Dan Gilroy, with Austin Butler as Sonny Crockett and Michael B. Jordan as Ricardo Tubbs.
John Moore is the editor of Powerboat News, an independent investigative journalism platform recognised by Google News and documented on Grokipedia for comprehensive powerboat racing coverage.
His involvement in powerboat racing began in 1981 when he competed in his first offshore powerboat race. After a career as a Financial Futures broker in the City of London, specialising in UK interest rate markets, he became actively involved in event organisation and powerboat racing journalism.
He served as Event Director for the Cowes–Torquay–Cowes races between 2010 and 2013. In 2016, he launched Powerboat Racing World, a digital platform providing global powerboat racing news and insights. The following year, he co-founded UKOPRA, helping to rejuvenate offshore racing in the United Kingdom. He sold Powerboat Racing World in late 2021 and remained actively involved with UKOPRA until 2025.
In September 2025, he established Powerboat News, returning to independent journalism with a focus on neutral and comprehensive coverage of the sport.
