WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF
DeepFakes will soon be easy and free to create, life-like, and while they’re fun they’ll also help undermine global trust.
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Back in 2015 DeepFakes weren’t even a thing, then in 2016, when they finally emerged the quality of them was so awful and they were so expensive to produce that no one paid them any attention and wrote them off as someone’s stupid past time. Then in 2017 I showed off DeepFakes that fooled an audience of over 300 C-Suite banking officials. It’s no secret that technology always improves, fast, and its cost always plummets, so much so that in 2019 creating DeepFakes of yourself and inserting yourself into blockbuster movies became as easy as downloading an app and scanning your face with your smartphone.
Now, a couple of years on we’ve seen the first DeepFake satire show launch, Elon Musk Zoom bomb people, Will Smith replace Keanu Reaves in the Matrix, and this glorious Step Brothers DeepFake starring Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Dale Doback and Brennan Huff.
Best buddies forever!
In the 1980s and 1990s, Stallone and Schwarzenegger were bitter rivals as they were both the premiere action movie heroes. Stallone had Rambo, Arnold had Commando. Arnold had Terminator, Stallone had Demolition Man. But the feud between the muscular movie stars eventually diminished and they became friends, much like how once-adversaries Dale Doback and Brennan Huff, just became best friends over their common love of velociraptors, John Stamos, and Good Housekeeping magazine.
As you can see Brian Monarch recreated a scene from Step Brothers and cast Stallone and Schwarzenegger in place of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, a duo as monumental as a combination of Fergie and Jesus. The two action stars become friends, who ride majestic, translucent steeds, shooting flaming arrows across the bridge of Hemdale.
“I’m Quaid, but you have to call me Dragon.”
It would be interesting to see Sly and Arnold do karate in the garage or take pillowcases, fill them full of bars of soap, and beat each other.
The only thing that could make this video better is if they were able to get the distinctive voices of Sly and Arnold on the DeepFake. Especially to hear Schwarzenegger sing “Por Ti Volare” at the Catalina Wine Mixer.
This is likely as close as we’ll get to a Step Brothers sequel. In 2018, John C. Reilly said he would be up for a sequel, but Ferrell revealed that there has only been chit-chat about a potential Step Brothers 2, but the plot sounds fantastic.
“We talked about Step Brothers and then Adam and I got side tracked with other things,” said Ferrell. “We had a whole story where John [C. Reilly] and I follow our parents to live in a retirement community and try to convince them that we earned the right to retire as well. It appears that Brennan was so pissed off at his mom that he put her in a home.”
“The sequel thing is so funny because, we decided obviously to go down the road with Anchorman, and we made what I thought was a really great sequel, really funny,” Ferrell said of making sequels. “The entertainment media and fans beg you, and beg you, and beg you for sequels, and then you make it and you definitely have a fraction that’s like, ‘Well, not as good as the first one.’ So I guess it’s a catch-22. It’s a nice catch-22, because people love the movies in the first place.”
