A viral, fan-made video features actor Kirsten Dunst virtually edited into cutscenes from Marvel’s Spider-Man on the PlayStation 4.
Reddit user u/sxydoctor uploaded the five-second-long video to the r/Spiderman subreddit, which features two clips of Mary Jane speaking to an off-screen Peter Parker. The clip was created by deepfake artist BabyZone and was cut from a larger video, which also features deepfakes of Toby Maguire’s Spider-Man, Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus and Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin.
“I created this video using DeepFake technology,” said YouTuber Babyzone, who explained that they used programs called DeepFaceLab 2.0 by IPerov “to create the models and perform the characters training.” They continued, “I created a faceset for each actor and then trained the 192DF model separately for each scene. All raw footage were heavily edited in an entertaining trailer-style.”
The video currently has 30k upvotes on Reddit as of this writing and is currently the eleventh “Top” post of the month on the subreddit and garnered mixed reactions from fans. The top comments praise the accuracy of the deepfake; though the video is short, Dunst’s face was seamlessly edited into the footage to replace the original face model, Stephanie Tyler Jones. There are no visible seams or noticeable desynchronization when Mary Jane’s head moves. On the other side, several Reddit users voiced concerns over the morality and future implications of the use and improvement of deepfake technology, which is often used by fans to insert famous actors into popular media.
While fan projects that bring familiar faces to Marvel’s Spider-Man aren’t new, Insomniac Games riled up a minor controversy among players after the developer completely remodeled Peter Parker’s face for the remastered PS5 version of the game. While fans expected visual improvements on newer hardware, it came as a surprise when John Bubniak, the model for the original Peter Parker, was replaced by Ben Jordan. Sony claimed that the newer motion capture actor more closely resembled Peter’s voice actor and was easier for the animators to use.
Dunst portrayed Mary Jane alongside Maguire’s Peter Parker/Spider-Man in Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy. While the deepfake is currently the only indication Dunst will return to the Spider-Verse, fans are excited to see similar crossovers happen when Spider-Man: No Way Home releases this year. The movie’s first trailer already revealed or hinted at the return of characters like Molina’s Doctor Octopus and Jamie Foxx’s Electro from The Amazing Spider-Man films.
Developed by Insomniac Games and PlayStation Studios, Marvel’s Spider-Man is currently available on PlayStation 4.
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