I first heard of director Adam Wingard when he was making micro-budget movies in Alabama, so it's been fascinating to watch his career grow over the years, starting from the days of Home Sick and Pop Skull, reaching another level with You're Next and The Guest, and then blowing up with the likes of Blair Witch, Death Note, and Godzilla vs. Kong. For his next project, Wingard has signed on to take the helm of a "direct sequel" to John Woo's 1997 sci-fi action classic Face/Off (watch it HERE) for Paramount.
Wingard will be writing the new Face/Off with Simon Barrett, who he has previously collaborated with on A Horrible Way to Die, Autoerotic, contributions to the V/H/S/ and The ABCs of Death franchises, You're Next, The Guest, and Blair Witch. Details on their take have not been revealed, but Deadline doesn't think the first film's stars, Nicolas Cage and John Travolta, will be involved.
Neal Moritz will be producing Wingard's Face/Off, with David Permut executive producing.
Scripted by Mike Werb and Michael Colleary, the original Face/Off centered on
FBI agent Sean Archer. He is so obsessed with catching a homicidal sociopath named Castor Troy, who is responsible for killing the fed’s son, that the agent undergoes facial transplant surgery and takes the mug of his nemesis so he can be sent to prison to find out a bomb’s whereabouts and stop an attack. The plan goes awry when the bad guy wakes up and takes the face of the FBI agent. Soon, the new-faced Castor visits the agent with the villainous face and takes glee in taunting him, telling him that the face surgeons have been killed, that the good guy is stuck looking in the mirror at the face he hates most, and that the villain is going home to bed his wife and take over his home life. It escalates into a series of choreographed action sequences.
I'm very interested to see what Wingard and Barrett are going to do with this concept.