Creepy Uses of Deepfakes in Mainstream Movies and TV
Visual storytelling is necessarily a collaborative endeavor, which means there are multiple points (i.e., temperamental creative people) where everything can go wrong. The good news is we can now eliminate some of the most unpredictable variables of the process — the onscreen talent. Mainstream movies and television are increasingly hopping aboard the deepfake bandwagon, so get ready for a creep-ass cinematic future.
The Book of Boba Fett
The CGI de-aging of Mark Hamill on The Mandalorian was slammed into space, so the producers of The Book of Boba Fett decided they could make a better Mark Hamill than Mark Hamill. He just stayed home while they hired some guy off YouTube to deepfake young Luke Skywalker without even the benefit of Hamill’s iconic voice. Was it cheaper? Almost certainly. Was it also worse? Oh, yes.
Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam
The only reassuring part of the story of Lou Pearlman, the boy band manager who single-handedly destroyed the pop music industry in the ‘90s while running a vast Ponzi scheme and probably sexual misconducting, is that he’s no longer alive to creep us out. The producers of the Netflix documentary Dirty Pop took that away from us, using ancient footage and text from his autobiography to force Pearlman to narrate his own downfall. Repeat after us: “Deepfake Lou Pearlman can’t get me.”
Deep Fake Love
Netflix has gone all in on deepfake nonfiction, somehow more horrifyingly with Deep Fake Love, a Spanish reality TV show that sets couples up in separate Bachelor pads, shows them footage of their partners that may or may not reveal them engaged in real sexual acts with their roomies, and tasks them with figuring out whether it’s fake. Esquire called it “Netflix’s Stanford prison experiment,” a truly underrated comparison.
Deep Fake Neighbor Wars
Listen, we could actually get on board with using deepfake technology to depict Idris Elba stealing figs from Kim Kardashian’s garden and Tom Holland and Nicki Minaj as a married couple who wear matching velour tracksuits, but that’s not what ITV’s Deep Fake Neighbor Wars was. The celebrities “played” normal people having normal disputes who just happened to have famous names. For example, Kim Kardashian is a bus driver and also apparently on ketamine. It amazingly lasted a whole season.
Here
Okay, maybe Here will become a 21st-century classic, but when you hire one of the most celebrated actors working today and then take away one of his primary acting tools, it doesn’t look good. Literally. You can barely see Tom Hanks’s mouth move in some scenes in the trailer. “The film simply wouldn’t work without our actors seamlessly transforming into younger versions of themselves,” according to director Robert Zemeckis, but he also thought the dead-eyed motion capture of The Polar Express was a good idea.
Wait, does this man just have some sort of digital vendetta against Tom Hanks?