As unquestionably successful as Disney's series of live-action remakes have been, each one has left longtime fans wondering about the future of these films and whether or not visual realism is really the way to go. That was certainly a point of contention with The Lion King, which, as many fans and critics pointed out, sacrificed the magic of the original animated classic for photorealism, resulting in seemingly expressionless characters and unimpressive musical sequences.
Apparently, it's nothing that technology can't fix. One Lion King fan remade the trailer using deepfakes in order to bring the live-action characters visually closer to their animated counterparts, resulting in a look resembling what most fans seemed to have expected.
Deepfake technology works through machine learning, which enables a computer to essentially take an image and create others that resemble it, then superimpose those images on to another. This fan trailer is one of the more wholesome uses of the technology.
Despite the complaints some fans and plenty of critics have had about The Lion King, the Disney remake earned more than $1 billion at the worldwide box office after just three weeks in theaters, making it the fourth Disney remake to do so.
Currently in theaters, director Jon Favreau's The Lion King features the voices of Donald Glover, Seth Rogen, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Alfre Woodard, Billy Eichner, John Kani, John Oliver, Florence Kasumba, Eric André, Keegan-Michael Key, JD McCrary, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and James Earl Jones.