Only a modest success at the time of its release, The Faculty is now more beloved than it was back in 1998. Moody, campy, and young-blooded in all the right ways, the teen body-snatcher horror found renewed appreciation on cable and VHS before the internet embraced it as one of the cult classics. And guess what happens to anything remotely cult and popular these days? Yes, they get a revival.
The Faculty remake is officially in development at Miramax, with original director Robert Rodriguez producing and Companion filmmaker Drew Hancock writing the screenplay.
Is The Faculty 2 Happening?
The project currently in development is being described as a remake of the sci-fi horror cult favorite rather than a conventional sequel. Miramax announced in January 2025 that Robert Rodriguez, who directed the original, would return as a producer, with Companion filmmaker Drew Hancock writing the new screenplay. BoulderLight Pictures, the company behind Barbarian and Weapons, is also producing.
That distinction matters because fans hoping to see the original gang reunite may want to keep their expectations somewhere below the ceiling.
The big question, naturally, is whether anyone from the original cast will return.
Will The Faculty’s Original Cast Return?
The 1998 pic starred young up-and-coming actors who have since become household names like Elijah Wood, Josh Hartnett, Jordana Brewster, Clea DuVall, and Usher (yes, the R&B superstar) as schoolmates who must band together against mind-controlled teachers. Revisiting the movie that they made before all the billion-dollar film franchises and multi-platinum albums sure would be fun and nostalgic, though don’t really count on it.
Josh Hartnett has gone on record saying he would love to reprise his role as Zeke, the school’s resident bad boy, ‘only if Robert Rodriguez directed and the entire original cast returned. Hartnett later made his feelings even clearer: “I wouldn't want to dishonor Zeke by shifting people's memories of him. I really loved that character and the movie exactly as it was.”
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That probably makes a Zeke comeback rather complicated. Rodriguez is involved, yes, but he is producing rather than returning to the director’s chair. As for the entire original cast, that would be a much taller order after nearly three decades. They are, of course, way too old to still be playing kids under the tutelage of a faculty. While plenty of remakes have found ways to bring back legacy characters, leaving the original cast behind could give the new movie a clean slate to make its own mark.
What Will The Faculty Remake Be About?
The original The Faculty, set at a fictional high school in Ohio, follows a group of students who begin to realize that members of the faculty have been infected by parasitic aliens. The premise is wonderfully simple: something is very wrong with the teachers, and the students have to figure out what is happening before the entire school becomes a hive mind.
Rodriguez directed the film from a screenplay by Kevin Williamson, based on a story by David Wechter and Bruce Kimmel. It eventually grossed $63.2 million worldwide, a respectable result that helped the film develop its cult following over the years.
A big part of the first movie was its potent mix of high school drama and sci-fi thriller. There was a lot of alien invasion action and slasher-esque plot turns, but there was also an emphasis on the dynamics between the students, all from different archetypes of high schoolers: the cheerleader, the nerd, the jock, the drug-dealing troublemaker, you name it. They have very little reason to hang out together under normal circumstances. An alien invasion provides a rather aggressive team-building exercise.
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The Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style premise might be what initially drew people to watch, but it was the high school subplots that made it special. What the remake really needs back isn’t necessarily the stars, but that perfect balance between horror and camaraderie.
Reportedly, the new film is expected to focus on an entirely new generation of characters. That approach gives Hancock a chance to recreate the basic formula in a completely different school environment without having to force the original characters into another alien apocalypse.
As Hartnett put it, “They're moving the story elsewhere, and that's fine."
This makes sense – the strength of the movie lies in this genre mix. They can take the basic playbook and reapply it to a different school environment. It didn’t need to be Scream where Sydney Prescott has to face a revolving door of Ghostface every few years. The door is wide open for the creative team to start over with a whole new set of characters, perhaps with a legacy cameo or two along the way.
What Drew Hancock Has Said About the New Faculty Movie
Hancock certainly seems to understand why the original worked.
Speaking with Rue Morgue, the director explained that the film captures something inherent and universal about being a teenager. “I think the emotions are exactly the same, you know? There are cosmetic differences to high school, so I’ve had to do the research and find out, oh, no one has lockers anymore. I can’t have a scene that takes place between two people at their lockers, because they just don’t exist. It’s actually kind of fun exploring what is new, but it’s all in a world where you’re dealing with teenage emotions, and those haven’t changed. I’m sure those were the same 1,000 years ago. Every decision they make is, to them, the most important decision they’ve ever made, and all the emotions are dialed to 11. It’s going to be fun to play with that in the FACULTY world of conformity and that alien invasion layer.”
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There is something very useful in that observation. The technology of high school changes. The lockers disappear. The slang becomes increasingly impossible for adults to understand. Yet the basic emotional experience remains remarkably recognizable.
A teenager getting ghosted can feel like the end of civilization.
In The Faculty, the actual end of civilization was also on the table.
That makes the premise surprisingly easy to modernize.
What The Faculty Remake Needs to Get Right
The Faculty remake
Plain and simple: capture the energy and tone of the original.
That may be the biggest challenge. The Faculty was never simply an alien movie. It had a particular late '90s personality, mixing teen drama with pulpy science fiction and horror. Rodriguez brought a kinetic genre sensibility to the material, while Williamson's screenplay gave the characters enough personality to make the alien invasion matter.
The remake needs that same spark.
And then there is a potentially delicious idea: reverse it.
The faculty are the good guys. The students are the aliens.
It would be a neat way to mess with the original premise without simply repeating it. The first movie trained audiences to distrust the teachers. What happens when the new students arrive, and the teachers are the ones who realize something is deeply wrong?
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That could also play into the original film's theme of conformity. In the first movie, the students have to figure out which adults have been taken over while desperately trying to avoid becoming infected themselves. A new version could flip that paranoia around. Suddenly, the adults are the ones investigating strange behavior among their students.
The potential is huge.
Technology could also become part of the horror itself. The original movie used its era's concerns about drugs and peer pressure as part of the plot. Zeke's homemade drug plays a pivotal part in identifying the alien parasite, eventually becoming the unlikely weapon that helps save the school.
So what is the equivalent of that in today's iteration?
That is where Hancock has a fun problem to solve.
Perhaps it could involve something students already use every day. Perhaps the answer will have nothing to do with social media at all. The important thing is that the new story needs its own clever mechanism rather than simply recreating Zeke's drug plot with a 2020s replacement.
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The Faculty remake
The original The Faculty succeeded because its absurd science fiction premise was grounded in recognizable teenage behavior. The remake has the opportunity to do the same thing for a new generation.
And Robert Rodriguez's presence gives the project a direct connection to the movie that started it all. He knows exactly what kind of strange little creature The Faculty was. Hancock, meanwhile, arrives after making Companion, another genre movie that played with assumptions about relationships, identity, and control in the 2020s. This juxtaposition of the old and new generation – just like the film’s teens vs adults showdown – could inject the potential movie with the best of both worlds.
If the new Faculty can capture the paranoia, humor, and teenage energy of the original without simply copying it, this might be one ’90s horror revival actually worth making.
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Sources:
https://movieweb.com/josh-hartnett-faculty-horror-film-reboot-update
