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Nicolas Cage looks like he will be reuniting with Face/Off director John Woo this summer as the pair set cameras rolling on the crime biopic, Gambino. The movie has been in the works for some time, but it was revealed in November 2025 that the pair would respectively be starring in and directing the story of notorious New York mob kingpin Carlo Gambino. Now, it looks like the film has locked in a filming start window thanks to a report from ScreenDaily.
As per the report, Gambino is being set up as the first of eight movies being lined up by Icarus Entertainment Fund and NextG Brothers Fund, who are looking to make an Atlanta-based one-stop-shop to provide financing, production, and post-production. NextG founder Edward Zeng told Screen:
“We’ve been building this [Gambino] for three years. We want to make the most high-impact movie and bring people back to the theatre.”
Gambino will begin its $40 million production in the summer, with filming set to take place in Georgia, New Jersey, New York, and Sicily. In the movie, Cage plays Carlo Gambino, “a butcher’s son from Sicily, who rules New York’s underworld with quiet authority. But when his death sends shockwaves through the city, Pulitzer-winning journalist Jimmy Breslin follows the trail he left behind to uncover the man beneath the legend. Through the voices of those who loved him and those who feared him, Breslin peels back the composure that masked Gambino’s ruthlessness, revealing how this outsider rose to redefine power, loyalty and the American dream.”
Woo will be hoping to see this Face/Off reunion fare better than his John Gotti movie starring John Travolta, which was a critical disaster in 2018. After becoming one of the most successful Asian action movie directors of the 1980s, he shifted focus to Hollywood in the 1990s, with Face/Off being one of his biggest hits alongside some subsequent flops like Mission: Impossible II and Paycheck.
Cage, meanwhile, has been in the middle of a career renaissance in the last several years, with movies like Pig, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Longlegs, and Arcadian giving the actor some of his best reviews in 20 years. This May he will play a Spider-Man variant in Prime Video’s Spider-Noir, a series that comes with some high expectations and could be another huge hit for the Cage.
Woo and Cage Reunite After 23 Years for ‘Gambino’
Although Woo and Cage’s best known collaboration was on Face/Off, the pair have worked together again since, on the 2002 WWII movie Windtalkers. Also starring Mark Ruffalo, Adam Beach, Christian Slater, and Peter Stormare, the film received mixed reviews and struggled to attract audiences at the box office. The film ended its theatrical run with a $76.7 million worldwide gross, but was sporting a $115 million budget.
With Gambino, the pair could put the disappointment of Windtalkers behind them, and with Cage’s current hot streak of films, anything is possible. In the meantime, Cage could also be returning for a sequel to Woo’s Face/Off along with John Travolta. While the sequel to the 1997 hit is reportedly set to see Adam Wingard take over directing duties, there has been little movement on the film in over a year. Fans of the original would no doubt love to see Cage and Travolta back together again, but for now, they are just playing a waiting game while Cage’s upcoming roster of movies continues to grow.
