It truly is the Age of Cage.
Oscar-winner Nicolas Cage has taken over cinema once more with a string of recent critically acclaimed hits — “Mandy,” “Pig,” “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” — and Hollywood has taken notice.
Cage himself is hoping for collaborations with the likes of Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, and Christopher Nolan — who among them would say no? — and even teasing a possible musical on the horizon, plus more comedies hopefully in the works. It seems like the perfect time for the imminent “Face/Off 2.”
“Godzilla vs. Kong” director Adam Wingard has been preparing a script for a sequel to John Woo’s 1997 action classic starring Cage and John Travolta as a mobster and police officer who go undercover as each other and trade places (and faces).
“We’re really honing in on it,” Wingard told Empire magazine. “We’re not going to share it until everybody’s like, ‘This is the one.’”
Despite Cage’s character seemingly dying in the original film, “Face/Off 2” will be an “absolute sequel” that would resurrect his character.
“He’s just having such a moment. Even before ‘Pig’ came out, we saw this as a Nicolas Cage movie,” Wingard said. “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, Nicolas Cage is one of the hottest actors in Hollywood again.”
“The Guest” director added that “Face/Off 2” has been “the most challenging script we’ve ever worked on” with longtime collaborator Simon Barrett. “There’s so much pressure in wanting to make sure that it lives up to the legacy of that project. But every draft you have these things that just click in, and you’re like, ‘A-ha! That’s really what ‘Face/Off’ is!’”
Cage gave an update on the sequel amid the project being in the works for over a decade. The “Moonstruck” star explained in April that he had been “making some calls” about the status of the project.
Writer-director Wingard told IndieWire in March 2021 that the studio was giving him and Barrett full control over the “Face/Off” IP.
“This is 100 percent our story and our script,” Wingard explained. “We’re making a sequel. But that’s the exciting part about it, that it’s our version of what would happen after ‘Face/Off,’ 20-plus years later.”
And they’re not holding back when it comes to big-budget action sequences: “There’s a scene in the script where we needed a character to have a discussion with another character very quickly to set something up early on,” Wingard said. “Back in the day, we would’ve been like, ‘Okay, let’s set this in a coffee shop or something.’ Nowadays it’s like, ‘You know what? Have a helicopter land behind them and have them get in the helicopter, and let them have this conversation while they’re in a helicopter!’ It’s just thinking bigger. It’s not necessarily easy to go from the independent way of thinking to the big budget thing, but once you’re there, the sky’s the limit.”
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