Having spent almost his entire career to date working in low budget horror, Adam Wingard is set to become a fixture of studio shortlists looking for a talented pair of hands to helm mega budget blockbusters thanks to Godzilla vs. Kong. The MonsterVerse epic debuted to $123 million internationally over the weekend, and it’s the first movie of the pandemic era to open on over 3000 screens domestically.
Factor in the inevitable uptick in HBO Max subscribers, and we’re comfortably talking about the biggest Hollywood release in over a year, one that could go a long way to revitalizing the industry throughout the rest of 2021. Wingard has already been announced to helm a live-action/CGI hybrid take on ThunderCats, but next up looks to be his Face/Off sequel.
The director has been talking about the project a lot while on the press circuit for Godzilla vs. Kong, but he’s not been giving away much in terms of specifics. It’s becoming increasingly clear that his concept is hugely dependent on the returns of John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, though, and in a new interview, the 38 year-old went one step further by confirming that Face/Off 2 is a continuation of their story.
“I’m going to do the next available thing, quickly. Maybe that’s Face/Off 2. When I look at Face/Off, some people have said if you are going to follow that film, it’s about the operation, a sci-fi gimmick. To me, that’s now what it is. It’s part of it and is what makes it so unique and fun. But the story is really about the characters. Sean Archer and Castor Troy. The film is a follow-up to their story, and what it entails.”
At the end of John Woo’s action classic, Castor Troy was dead and Sean Archer had returned to resume his happy family life, so it’ll be interesting to discover how Wingard is planning to shake things up a quarter of a century later. On paper, there aren’t many reasons to get hugely excited about the prospect of Face/Off 2, but if there’s a good enough premise at the center of it and it can live up to the expectations and pressure that comes with following the original, then we should give the filmmaker the benefit of the doubt.
