See Henry Cavill Take Over For Hugh Jackman As Wolverine
A deepfake video depicts Henry Cavill as Hugh Jackman's Wolverine in a scene from the X-Men's origin movie.
Hugh Jackman is almost everyone’s favorite mutant in the X-men universe and thanks to the beautiful world of technology, a super-fan of the series has superimposed Henry Cavill’s face via deepfakes to be the new Wolverine in the original 2013 reboot of Logan’s story.
This fan-made trailer/clip was initially released on December 18, 2022 by the Youtube channel: Stryder HD. The clip shows a scene from the original Wolverine where Logan (Huge Jackman) is being recruited by Yukio — a mutant with the ability to see people’s death — to come back to the world from his rural Yukon logging job to save the CEO of a Zaibatsu (corporation in English) Ichirō from his cancerous death sentence.
However, Stryder HD has reimagined the scene with Henry Cavill as Logan, and it fits almost picture-perfect. If you have never seen the film, you could almost believe that Cavill is in fact, the Wolverine … almost. The channel creates the deepfakes as a proof of concept to see what it would look like to have other actors step into the shoes of well-known characters.
Both heroes and villains get this treatment. While the channel owner and VFX artist painstakingly create the visuals by themselves, they can match the actor’s (in this case Henry Cavill’s) voice via the Voice AI Voice Changer program. If you close your eyes, it does indeed sound like the former superman is hiding from his past in a rural logging village in the Yukon territory of northern Canada.
Stryder HD doesn’t stop at Henry Cavill being the next Wolverine. Instead, the channel goes on to drop various actors into seemingly random roles across the superhero universes. Including but not limited to: Daniel Crag playing Geralt in The Witcher, Tom Cruise starring as the next Tony Stark in Iron Man, and even Robert Downey Jr. playing Professor-X in X-men: The Mutants.
While these incredible concept pieces are sure to turn a few heads, how exactly does this deepfake technology work? For the visual aspect, deepfake videos rely on neural networks and deep-learning artificial intelligence to change a video frame by frame. In layman’s terms, a super smart computer program takes hundreds of thousands of pictures and video frames from the chosen subject to then replace every frame of a video.
In Stryder HD’s case, the channel owner will touch up where the A.I. wasn’t able to fix to create a nearly-flawless video of Henry Cavill taking on the role of Logan. The audio A.I. works in a very similar fashion.
While it was confirmed that Hugh Jackman will be returning as Logan in future films, this basic concept could fundamentally change what kind of fan-made media is created in the future. Of course, there will always be the standard fan-made media. Fan-fic, music, story mashups, and the strange crossovers will continue to be made in super-cuts and written media.
However, as deepfakes become easier and more accessible to the average user of social media and technology, the question becomes what kind of movies, videos, and fake trailers will be spread across the internet and how will studios keep up with rumors and various copyright problems?
