Tom Holland and Robert Downey Jr. are now in Back to the Future – sort of. It’s not a remake currently in production. Instead, it’s the 1985 original movie, and their roles come by way of a deep fake, a process that can be as unnerving as it is amazing. If you’ve not yet seen a deep fake, think of it as a digital facelift, literally.
With deep fakes, people can be made to look like they’re saying things they never said, or, in the case of Back to the Future, it can totally recast classic movies with a more modern father-son pairing. In this case, it’s Spider-Man and Iron Man themselves, now starring in the iconic roles of Marty McFly and Doc Brown.
Of all the scenes to recreate using this already creepy technology, they just had to go and remake the one when Marty finds out his mom has a crush on him. At least Tony Stark is there to talk him through the complicated process of shifting your mom’s attraction from your time-traveling self over to your future dad.
If instead of Holland as McFly you prefer Michael J. Fox as Spider-Man, that’s also a thing that exists – really, how could it not be? Deep fakes are becoming more common, so hopefully we can all commit to only using this emerging technology for good, like turning movie remakes into inexpensive weekend-long fan projects.
We recently ranked the best movies of the 1980s, and it should go without saying that Back to the Future ranks high on the list. As for Tom Holland, you don’t have to pretend he’s in the long-delayed Uncharted movie. He’s playing Nathan Drake, and says he loves the script.
The Uncharted movie took so long to produce that Mark Wahlberg has been re-cast as Sully instead of Nathan Drake.
