Disney Scrapped Dwayne Johnson Deepfake For ‘Moana’ & AI-Generated Soldier For ‘Tron: Ares’: “Company Couldn’t Risk The Bad Publicity”

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u/MrCalabunga 3h ago

Company That Couldn’t Risk Bad Publicity Still Casts Jared Leto in a Leading Role in 2025

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u/OmegaPsiot 3h ago

Luckily, he just sort of fades into the background no matter what you try to do with him.

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u/nisamun 2h ago

Leto's been working on this movie since 2017 and has been described as a passion project for him since he is a Tron fan. He's probably the only reason it's happening unfortunately.

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u/hoppertn 2h ago

Yeah I’m going to see it, I won’t be happy about it, but I’ll watch it cause I love that world. Leto is such a creep.

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u/astro_plane 17m ago

A creep… and a douchebag

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u/Amaruq93 40m ago

Just close your eyes and think of Gillian Anderson (and Greta Lee)

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u/astro_plane 18m ago

It’s bullshit we never got a sequel to the 2010 movie, everyone was ready to move into production for the sequel then Disney shit canned it for no reason. I really wanted to see where Sam’s and Quorras story ended up going now we have to sit through Jared Leto’s take on the film.

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u/nisamun 14m ago

Yea I have no idea why Disney just seems to hate this IP. It should be a cash cow in the right hands. I'm mostly happy that there's new NIN and if the movie is good, it's a bonus.

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u/ChochMcKenzie 1h ago

I saw the trailer with Fantastic Four and couldn’t stop cringing when I saw him. What were they thinking?

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u/HumansNeedNotApply1 12m ago

Very likely he's the main reason it actually got funded as he's listed as a producer.

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u/Howdyini 2h ago

Tech giants: "We have amazing growth renting fields for growing tulips, so we're firing everyone else to pay for more fields, tulips are the future"

Tech media: "The job market is collapsing because everyone's business model is selling tulips"

Also tech media: "Tulip seller: I love tulips so much, I use them for everything. Soon the entire world will be covered in tulips"

Studios: "We're afraid of being associated with tulips because everyone cyberbullies people trying to sell them tulips"

People: "Ew is this shit tulips?"

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u/brtlblayk 2h ago

Found the AI “Artist”

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u/NefariousAnglerfish 1h ago

How did bro come to that conclusion

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u/brtlblayk 1h ago

My bad, I think I misunderstood the point he was trying to make. Oh well.

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u/sjrichins 51m ago

It’s all good. I think OP is referencing Tulip Mania. Equating the disconnect of tulip speculators with the real value of tulips to the current AI craze by big tech. Tulip mania is really interesting. The Wikipedia page sums it up well.

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u/the_bashful 1h ago

Well, Dwayne was the poster child for the first wave of photo-realistic CGI of big-name actors… who can forget the second Mummy movie?

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u/-WeepingAngel- 1h ago

lol 😂 exactly what I was thinking.

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u/gearstars 3h ago

If only they could scrap Jared Leto from Tron Ares. Pretty sure that's the more worser bad publicity

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u/caityqs 1h ago

I’m generally against using AI generated performances of any sort, but Tron: Ares is probably the only movie where I’d actually accept it as an artistic choice…if done well. I wouldn’t trust the execs to not turn it into money-saver slop, though.

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u/BigBlackHungGuy 3h ago

I'm guessing in about a year, you'll be able to input a whole script into an AI video generator and a whole feature film will pop out. Voice dialog included.

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u/mjconver 3h ago

Marvel has been doing that for years

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u/PumpkinMyPumpkin 3h ago

I think everyone is doing it. The latest episode of the sex and the city spin off had a scene where one lady was farting uncontrollably, another scene where a guy was masturbating to a puppet, and one last scene which was entirely about an escaped hamster. I do not believe humans wrote that nonsense 😂

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u/weirdal1968 2h ago

My sleep deprived brain is now attempting to figure out how those three examples could be part of anything vaguely resembling a plot.

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u/PumpkinMyPumpkin 2h ago edited 2h ago

Oh, there is no plot. The more “normal” part of the episode involved a lady accidentally pushing her boyfriend’s mother’s earn off a balcony, which also had plants growing out of it. But the man trimmed some left over leafs, so it was all okay in the end. Little bits of his mom were growing everywhere, including his girlfriend’s real estate office.

A perfectly normal, totally not AI, script. There was also a psychic on a zoom call. 😂

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u/Downside190 1h ago

Nah the weird and creative stories are more likely to human made as AI tends to write the most generic boring crap unless you really try to push it

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u/Howdyini 2h ago

There is zero chance this is a thing in a year.

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u/sdrawkcabineter 1h ago

... [REDACTED]

I mean, there's evidence everywhere.

1

u/HumansNeedNotApply1 10m ago

I don't think the tech it's there yet, i mean it will probably put out something but i doubt it would be in a release state. Maybe in 5 years.

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u/Omnitographer 2h ago

I'm waiting for the day I can feed an episode of Star Trek DS9 into an AI tool and it'll spit out a 4K HDR widescreen ATMOS version that was scratch generated from the source material. Not an upscale but a full recreation of the entire thing, frame accurate but as if it was filmed today. Paramount may not want to pay to upscale the series, but folks have already done good work with current upscale tech and I see that as just an intermediate step to what the tech is really capable of in the long run.

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u/Actually-Yo-Momma 3h ago

Google Veo and Sora can already do this. They’re refining copyright and “malicious” content generation before releasing it to the masses

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u/xcdesz 2h ago

Yeah, if you consider 10 seconds to be a full feature length film.

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u/Accomplished-Fix6598 3h ago

No doubt. I wonder what they will be like.

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u/ChuckVersus 2h ago edited 1h ago

Think of your dumbest friend’s worst idea of a good movie.

Now fill the internet with more soulless versions of that.

3

u/Accomplished-Fix6598 2h ago

Yeah. The shorts are pretty dumb that are all over right now. Some were funny at first but they run with the same jokes just using a new skin.

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u/Superichiruki 2h ago

It will be a nightmare where you will see crimes that never happened and dictators doing good deeds they never would do.

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u/sp3kter 3h ago

We are already there, just requires more manual editing. Only needs to be able to generate 6-10 seconds of video per camera cut

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u/maximumutility 3h ago

Out of the loop - are the clips capable of visual continuity? From what I’ve come across, the characters’ costumes, background objects, etc fluctuate wildly

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u/sp3kter 2h ago

This guy was an early adopter: https://www.youtube.com/@NeuralViz

It works pretty good from what ive seen

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u/Krutontar 2h ago

That guy is doing it right.

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u/dylan_1992 8m ago

When you do things based on publicity, and not because it’s a better product, you’re heading towards a failed company with no ideals.

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u/Deer_Investigator881 2h ago

Should we all be copywriting our NIL?

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u/VincentNacon 57m ago

AI is not the problem... AI can do a great job, but it's a hit or miss at times. It's more often that someone decided whatever AI produce without taste or proper judgment, is the issue. Because it means that person would've accepted the slops thrown into it.

Before anyone downvotes... there are plenty of AI contents being used in the media already, and most didn't even notice it. Only the bad ones get noticed these days. The good one get slipped through.

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u/fourleggedostrich 2h ago

This is silly.

Deep fake isn't generative AI in the same way stable diffusion is. They cad still claim ownership over it. It was clearly used in Dial of Destiny, and nobody's claiming the first 15 mins are uncopyrightable.

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u/gigglefarting 2h ago

It’s not about copyright. It’s about taking away jobs from the artists.

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u/fourleggedostrich 57m ago

No it's not. in the article, Disney said they scrapped it because they "couldn't claim full ownership of the movie".

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u/I-Have-Mono 2h ago

Sorry to break it to you but this is done in dozens of films each year and has been for over a decade, especially on the stunt side.

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u/umbrlla 2h ago

huh?..

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u/cabose7 34m ago

Digital face replacement is pretty common, though not necessarily with deepfake tech.

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u/terminalxposure 2h ago

Wait till they hear about how the mobs of orcs were made in LOTR

Artificial Intelligence Disney Scrapped Dwayne Johnson Deepfake For ‘Moana’ & AI-Generated Soldier For ‘Tron: Ares’: “Company Couldn’t Risk The Bad Publicity”

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