So-called deepfakes have become all the rage lately. We’ve seen Jim Carrey go on a murderous rampage as Jack Nicholson in The Shining, and Tom Selleck if he’d been Indiana Jones instead of Harrison Ford. One day, these deepfakes will probably be used to topple a government, or something equally hideous like that. But in the meantime, it’s letting us do silly fun things like swapping actors with other actors in classic films.
The latest movie to get the deepfake treatment comes from a YouTuber named EZRyderX47. He traded the likenesses of Tom Holland and Robert Downey Jr. with those of Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future. In the scene, Marty McFly has traveled back in time to 1955 and is roaming the halls of Hill Valley High School, devising a plan to get his parents to fall in love—with the help of 1955’s Doc Brown. It’s probably just this one scene, as this technology is still fairly new and takes a long time to render. But you know that eventually, we’ll see more scenes of these two from the ’80s classic. Heck, we’ll probably see the whole movie done this way.
You can watch the video down below:
While Robert Downey Jr. is clearly noticeable as not being the real Doc Brown we all know and love, it’s hard to even tell that Tom Holland’s face has replaced Michael J. Fox’s. Of course, it’s still Fox’s voice being used, but it’s crazy how similar the two are in appearance. Not that I’d ever want a remake of Back to the Future. Thank the maker that somehow that still hasn’t happened somehow. But if it were to happen, I now can’t see any other modern young actor in the role of Marty McFly except for Holland now. This video has ruined me.
Other recent deepfake examples are Harrison Ford if he’d played Han once again in Solo, and an amazing “what if?” scenario where we see the late, great Christopher Reeve as he would have looked like had he been Superman in Justice League. And in a curious case of what would have been some off-the-wall casting, we’ve even seen Keanu Reeves as Tony Montana in Scarface.
But it’s not just movies that folks are using deepfake technology on. Last year, we saw Tom Cruise’s face transplanted onto Bill Hader’s from on old appearance on the David Letterman Show. And even stranger, we’ve seen Nick Offerman become every single character on Full House. This Back to the Future version with the MCU’s Iron Man and Spidey is certainly less unsettling than those, but still gives new meaning to the words “uncanny valley.”
Even if they never remake Back to the Future, Holland and Downey had amazing chemistry together in the MCU films, and we hope that isn’t the last time we see those two working together. But instead of a perfect film like Back to the Future, how about just giving these two something entirely new? Or at the very least, don’t redo something that knocked it out of the park the first time around.
Featured Image: Universal Pictures