Deepfakes are funny, impressive and scary all at once. Since the technology first appeared in 2018, it’s quickly become more refined, allowing amateurs to recast popular movies with whatever actors they choose. I’ve seen Jim Carrey in The Shining, Bruce Lee playing Neo in The Matrix and, most horrifyingly, Sylvester Stallone taking over for Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. But the big one this week has been putting MCU buddies Tom Holland and Robert Downey Jr. in Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd’s shoes in Back to the Future. If you somehow haven’t seen it, check it out here.
Watching the clip, it’s easy to conclude that they’d be a great choice for a potential remake, with Holland in particular having an uncanny physical resemblance to Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly. But in a recent interview with ET, the actor conclusively scotched the idea of this ever happening, saying:
“I would not be interested because that is a perfect movie.”
He also went to explain how his performance in Spider-Man: Homecoming was explicitly patterned after Marty McFly in Back to the Future, along with several other iconic 1980s movies. In fact, back in a 2017 interview with Yahoo, he said:
“[Director Jon Watts] gave us a load of videos, old movies, to watch before starting shooting: Pretty in Pink, Back to the Future, Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. My goal was to try and kind of be our generation’s Marty McFly. That was what my all-time goal was, and I was actually lucky enough that a journalist said, ‘Oh, you’re kind of like Marty McFly in this movie.'”
But even if Holland and Downey Jr. were interested, a remake isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. Director Robert Zemeckis is implacably opposed to this ever taking place, with his position accurately summarized as ‘over my dead body.’ Here’s what he said on Back to the Future‘s 30th anniversary in 2015:
“[It] can’t happen until both [co-writer Bob Gale] and I are dead. And then I’m sure they’ll do it, unless there’s a way our estates can stop it. I mean, to me, [a remake is] outrageous. Especially since it’s a good movie. It’s like saying ‘Let’s remake Citizen Kane. Who are we going to get to play Kane?’ What folly, what insanity is that? Why would anyone do that?”
Given how remakes tend to turn out, that’s probably a good idea. That said, there was a neat spec script doing the rounds back in 2015 that’d have seen an African-American kid traveling thirty years back in time to 1985 and performing something like Kanye West’s “Power” at the Homecoming Dance. But let’s face it, both Holland and Zemeckis are probably right when they say it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie.