John Travolta and Nicolas Cage's 1997 sci-fi action thriller Face/Off was a film that was far better than it had any right to be, so the upcoming remake from Paramount Pictures and director Adam Wingard has some big shoes to fill.
The remake was first announced in 2019, with Wingard and writer Simon Barrett hopping aboard in 2021. Since then, updates on the project have been few and far between.
However, while out promoting his latest upcoming feature to io9, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Wingard disclosed, "Almost in the middle of production [on Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire], we were finishing our draft of the script and because both of us were too busy working on other things there was a plan to do a rewrite, and we picked a writer to work on it. And then the writers’ strike happened so that delayed things. Right now that’s still inactive, so I think the plan with that one will be that writer will continue working, and whenever that draft is done, Simon and I will get it back and we’ll take another crack at it."
It seems that Wingard and Paramount have hired another writer to work on Face/Off while Wingard finishes up duties on The New Empire.
It's also worth noting that in the same interview, Wingard noted that he's also attached to a live-action ThunderCats film, which could also be the next film he makes. In fact, Wingard states that the ThunderCats script is his top priority, coming off of The New Empire.
Plus, if The New Empire performs well at the box office, it's not out of the realm of possibility that Warner Bros. will approach Wingard to helm a third MonsterVerse film.
Before Wingard and Barrett joined the project, Paramount commissioned a script from Oren Uziel (22 Jump Street, Mortal Kombat), however, Wingard and Barrett opted to start from scratch.
The original Face/Off film unfolded a plot that lived up to its title as Travolta and Cage played an FBI special agent and terrorist who swap faces so that the FBI agent can go undercover. Things go awry when the terrorist frees himself from police custody, forces a surgeon to put the FBI agent's face on him and then kills everyone who knows about the procedure.
The original 1997 film, directed by John Woo, would go on to earn $245.7M worldwide from a production budget of $80M.