Face/Off sequel

Well, this changes things considerably.

Yesterday, Deadline reported that Adam Wingard (The Guest, Godzilla vs. Kong) would be co-writing and directing a remake of John Woo’s action classic Face/Off. But after the news started making the rounds, Wingard took to social media to make a significant clarification.

Turns out he’s not working on a Face/Off remake after all. Instead, Wingard refers to the project as a “direct sequel.” Whoa.

Simon Barrett, Wingard’s writing partner who is co-writing this new Face/Off project with him, shed a little bit of light on this situation with the following tweet:

Frankly, a remake of Face/Off sounded like a pretty awful idea. Woo’s style is so singular (despite being often imitated), and the combination of a post-Pulp Fiction John Travolta, the lunatic energy of Nicolas Cage, and the absolutely chef’s-kiss-perfect way that those two were able to pretend to inhabit the other’s body is a wholly unique collision that would be next to impossible to recapture. But thankfully, it sounds like Wingard and Barrett share that same mentality.

Which, of course, leads me to wonder what the heck a direct Face/Off sequel will consist of. Spoilers for the original movie, but it ends with Nic Cage’s villain character, Castor Troy, being impaled by a spear gun and dying, so it seems unlikely that they would bring him back. Perhaps there could be some sort of delayed psychological side effects of the original procedure, in which Travolta’s Sean Archer begins to have a mental break and think that he is Troy, or maybe he could talk to him in mirrors like James Franco does to Willem Dafoe in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies. That would at least be a way to bring Cage back into the fold. But Deadline claims this sequel’s leads will be recast. Maybe it’ll be about Sean Archer’s daughter, Jamie (Dominique Swain), all grown up and following in her father’s footsteps as an FBI Special Agent who just so happens to need to undergo the same experimental surgery her father pioneered decades before.

In 2019, we wrote about how Paramount was looking to remake Face/Off with writer Oren Uziel (22 Jump Street, Sonic the Hedgehog). But it seems that version has been abandoned in favor of Wingard and Barrett’s sequel take, which I am incredibly curious about. Will they really be able to create something that feels like it can stand next to Woo’s batshit ’90s classic? That’s a huge ask, and I look forward to finding out if they’re up to the challenge.

While we wait to see what their version will look like, check out this totally ridiculous take on Face/Off 2 that Funny or Die came up with a few years ago.

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