A few months before the release of the ultimately “meh”-received Justice League, essentially the D.C. Comics movie universe version of Marvel’s The Avengers, the news came out that star Henry Cavill (Superman, and, spoiler alert, Clark Kent) had to film some last-minute reshoots. One problem: He was under contract to film the next Mission Impossible movie, and that role required him to grow and keep a mustache. The result: Cavill shot his scenes as Superman with a mustache, and then Justice League filmmakers had to spend a fortune to digitally remove the facial hair from the final cut of the movie.
It…wasn’t seamless.
This is really disturbing. The CGI reshoots of Henry Cavill as Superman in #JusticeLeague make him look like human Shrek. pic.twitter.com/jM9kSuVDKn
— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) November 18, 2017
JUSTICE LEAGUE EXEC: We can just CGI Henry Cavill’s mustache out it will be fine and not look weird at all
HENRY CAVILL: pic.twitter.com/Ag41j6LbPn— Dana Schwartz (@DanaSchwartzzz) November 17, 2017
Henry Cavill's mustache could not be contained by mere human CGI pic.twitter.com/TnxdpbeNVT
— Zack (@Blankzilla) November 16, 2017
But then along came something called “deepfakes.” It’s an algorithim-turned-app-turned internet phenomenon in which faces in videos can be swapped out with other faces. And yes, if you were wondering, obviously this was used to make pornography. Many started using the free app to make dirty movies, using pre-existing porn but then pasting in faces of big-time Hollywood celebrities who would never do real porn. That’s quasi-legal and morally questionable, and a lot of places that would host that kind of thing have banned it.
But there’s still that technology out there, so deepfake enthusiasts are using it for less salacious things, such as replacing any actor in any movie with Nicolas Cage. Someone on DeepFakesClub also used it to fix Henry Cavill’s weird computer-painted-over mustache face in Justice League.