It was announced several years ago that Adam Wingard (V/H/S, You’re Next, The Guest, Blair Witch, Godzilla vs. Kong) had been hired to direct a new take on John Woo’s 1997 action-thriller Face/Off for Paramount, being billed as a sequel to the original movie that starred John Travolta and Nicolas Cage. Unfortunately, it looks like those plans have changed.
The Hollywood Reporter lets us know this weekend that Adam Wingard actually left the director’s chair for Face/Off 2 last summer, with the split said to be a mutual agreement.
“Face/Off 2 is now an open assignment at the studio,” The Hollywood Reporter notes in their exclusive report, “with other filmmakers pitching their own visions.”
Wingard told Empire in 2022, “[Nicolas Cage is] just having such a moment. Even before Pig came out, we saw this as a Nicolas Cage movie. That’s become totally the obvious way to go now. A couple of years ago, the studio maybe would have wanted a hot, young, up-and-coming actor or something. Now, Cage is one of the hottest actors in Hollywood again.”
“We’re really honing in on it,” Wingard said of the script he was writing with partner Simon Barrett. “We’re not going to share it until everybody’s like, ‘This is the one.’”
The original film starred John Travolta and Nicolas Cage as an FBI agent and a sadistic terrorist who quite literally swap faces. “In order to foil a terrorist plot, an FBI agent undergoes facial transplant surgery and assumes the identity of a criminal mastermind, who murdered his only son. The plan turns sour when the criminal wakes up prematurely and seeks revenge.”
What is Adam Wingard up to instead? Wingard’s next movie will be the action-thriller Onslaught for A24, but he will NOT be directing the next Godzilla x Kong movie, Supernova.
