Godzilla x Kong Director Has Bad News for Face/Off Sequel

In 2021, filmmaker Adam Wingard gave audiences the showdown they’ve been dreaming of in Godzilla vs. Kong, and while he’s returning to deliver the sequel Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, he offered bad news about another iconic collision, revealing that his planned Face/Off follow-up has been inactive. The director noted that one of the stumbling blocks was being in the middle of making Godzilla x Kong, with the next setback being last year’s writers’ strike then delaying things further. With Wingard set to develop a Thundercats movie next, it will seemingly be quite a long wait before a Face/Off sequel gains momentum.

“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,” Wingard explained to Gizmodo about developing the sequel with writer Simon Barrett. “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.”

The original 1997 movie starred Nicolas Cage and John Travolta as a terrorist and FBI agent, respectively, who are playing a twisted game of cat and mouse that evolves to physically transfer one another’s face onto each other’s body. Between the outlandish premise and compelling performances, as well as the impressive direction from John Woo, the film cemented itself as a classic action experience from the ’90s. 

While studios are excited about the prospect of rebooting iconic properties, Wingard previously explained that he views the project as an “absolute sequel” to the first film as opposed to being an attempt to reimagine the concept.

“I think we really got it,” Wingard professed to Empire in 2022. “It has been probably the most challenging script we’ve ever worked on, for a lot of reasons. 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!’”

Stay tuned for updates on the future of Face/Off 2.

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