South Park creators developed Donald Trump deepfake movie before pandemic forced change of plans
'South Park' creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker developed a full length deepfake Donald Trump movie.
The pair - whose 14-minute short 'Sassy Justice' featured a deepfake Trump voiced by Peter Serafinowicz reporting the news and was a viral hit on YouTube - had actually planned to go even further with a project they scrapped due to the pandemic.
Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Parker said: "Not a lot of people know that we were a day away from starting production on the first feature movie we had done since ‘Team America: World Police'.
“We were going to start shooting on the day that the pandemic shut everything down. It was months and months of getting ready for that movie, to just being like, ‘Nope, it’s over.’
"I went to the office to start packing up my things because I was just kind of in shock.”
The project - which is "on hold" due to its "very timely" nature - would have featured a nude deepfake of the former United States President.
Parker added: "It was going to be ‘Deep Fake: The Movie'. It was about this guy who looked exactly like Trump because we deep fake Trump’s face onto him.
"And it was this whole funny thing because, of course, it ends up with Trump just naked and getting run through the wringer and everything, and that’s why it was so funny and so timely.”
Stone admitted the "script was sort of timely", but they ended up pushing on with the deepfake arm of their Deep Voodoo production studio, which led to 'Sassy Justice'.
Serafinowicz was set to voice Trump in the film itself, while the duo aren't ruling out the idea of revisiting the scrapped movie in the future.
Stone quipped: "I don’t know, he could be running again."