South Park Creators Have A Lost Donald Trump Deepfake Movie
Of course they do.
This article is more than 2 years old
Not only have we been denied the chance to see DC’s Batgirl movie, we’ve also been denied the chance to see a Donald Trump deepfake movie from the twisted minds behind South Park. We are definitely living in the worst of parallel universes. In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, Matt Stone and Trey Parker discussed the 25-year legacy of South Park, as well as other projects, including an abandoned 2020 deepfake movie centered around then-President Donald Trump. The pandemic put a halt to the film just as it was about to go into production, but Stone and Parker still explored the concept in a series of videos titled Sassy Justice, which has its own YouTube channel.
IndieWire reports that the South Park creators had founded a studio called Deep Voodoo that utilized deepfake technology, which can digitally add a famous face onto the head of another actor. The technology has been around for a few years, but has been improved recently to the point that it is almost impossible to tell it’s fake. The usual indicator is that deepfake videos are usually done for comedic purposes, but as the Sassy Justice videos prove, you can believably show Donald Trump, Al Gore, and Mark Zuckerberg scream “vagina poop” for no reason whatsoever.
It’s been almost twenty years since Stone and Parker made a feature film (2004’s Team America: World Police), and fans have been waiting on a big-screen follow-up from the duo. In between recent seasons of South Park, they planned to film Deep Fake: The Movie, using British actor Peter Serafinowicz (Guardians of the Galaxy, Miracle Workers) to portray Donald Trump. The duo kept mum on the exact plot, but Parker did reveal “it ends up with Trump just naked and getting run through the wringer and everything, and that’s why it was so funny and so timely.” The pandemic delay, and the subsequent re-election loss by Trump, killed the “timeliness” of the story, however, and the movie was abandoned. “We’d have to majorly rethink it to do it now,” Parker said.
Instead of following through with the film, Parker and Stone went back to South Park, producing new episodes and some TV movies and specials for streaming service Paramount+. The Deep Voodoo studio didn’t close down, however, and ended up using the deepfake tech on other projects like a music video for Grammy winner Kendrick Lamar. The Sassy Justice videos they produced featured “Fred Sassy,” a fictional reporter and consumer advocate for a Cheyenne, Wyoming TV station who looks suspiciously like Donald Trump. The videos center around an expose of the deepfake trend, allowing for some fantastic “cameos” and gags.
Even without Deep Fake: The Movie becoming a reality, Parker and Stone are keeping busy. They recently signed a deal to continue making South Park episodes and specials through 2027, which will take them to season 30. The deal will pay them more than $900 million, so they won’t be hurting to keep their deepfake studio going. With Donald Trump still hinting at another run for the White House, Parker and Stone may yet find their story timely again, and we could get the lost Trump deepfake movie after all. If not, there’s always the possibility of more Sassy Justice in the future.
