It doesn’t sound like Trey Parker and Matt Stone will ever make their big deepfake movie
Their original concept was very "timely" before the pandemic, but not so much anymore
Everyone has picked up little hobbies over the pandemic, like reading, or gardening, or Gunpla, but South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone got really into making elaborate deepfake parody videos for a while there. It started as a web series called Sassy Justice where Peter Serafinowicz played a reporter for a news station in Wyoming who was deepfaked to look like Donald Trump, leading to… basically just that one joke but with different famous faces. Parker and Stone later revealed that they had actually started a whole deepfake-based production studio called Deep Voodoo, and they had been planning to use the tech to make deepfake movie about a guy who looks like Trump getting involved in some kind of shenanigans.
Days after they opened the studio, though, COVID-19 started making its Gump-esque back-and-forth run across the country, forcing them to go remote and put the movie on hold. Now, in a new interview with The L.A. Times, Parker and Stone make it sound like the movie is even more on hold than it was before. “It was very timely,” Parker notes, “and the timeliness of it has passed. We’d have to majorly rethink it to do it now.”
Parker also says that the movie “of course” involved this fake Trump “just naked and getting run through the wringer and everything,” which is “why it was so funny and so timely,” so it makes sense that they’d have to rethink it now that he’s not running the country and he’s not in front of everyone’s face 24/7. Maybe they could go back and do another season of That’s My Bush! instead? The Dubya years have retro appeal now, probably.
Anyway, Stone says that Deep Voodoo is still hanging on, at least, with Kendrick Lamar apparently using it for a recent video. He also notes that Trump “could be running again,” which… would at least make this movie idea timely again. So that’s… good. (No offense to Parker and Stone, but can we just establish that we hope this movie is never timely ever again?)