Henry Cavill’s Mustache In ‘Justice League’ Was Just Erased Better By A Cheap Computer And DeepFakes

Among the many criticisms made of Justice League, one frequent gripe was about the VFX work to digitally remove Henry Cavill’s mustache (the disturbing example photos are at the bottom of this post). He was reshooting scenes as Superman while under contract to Paramount for Mission Impossible 6, so the mustache had to stay on. Could those digital effects have been better It seems so, as some pretty impressive results have been achieved by YouTuber Deep Fakes with a $500 used computer and the free deepfakes algorithm.

Usually deepfakes is used to swap faces, either to put someone’s face onto a porn performer without their consent (bad) or to replace every actor with Nic Cage (good). This time, the algorithm taught an AI to digitally remove Cavill’s mustache, resulting in some clips that look better than the ones in the $300 million movie. Well, this is awkward.

DeepFakes Club explains:

[I] trained the computer model on two different version, mustached and shaven, of the same face. The model did a decent job of removing Cavill’s mustache, at least as cleanly as the average rushed morning shaving session. Due to the inflexibility of the current blending functions in the deepfaking software, I saved the shaved images without any blurring or blending functions. I then masked the shaved mouths and combined them with the original clips in video editing software.

Since celebrities have many photos of their face online, from every angle, the AI has plenty to work with. The results are impressive, as seen in the video above and in these GIFs courtesy of io9:

On the other hand, if Warner had access to deepfakes back when they were making Justice League, we would have missed out on so many jokes…

— Emma Tyler (@EmmaStoneTyler) November 20, 2017

JUSTICE LEAGUE EXEC: We can just CGI Henry Cavill’s mustache out it will be fine and not look weird at all

HENRY CAVILL: pic.twitter.com/Ag41j6LbPn

— Dana Schwartz (@DanaSchwartzzz) November 17, 2017

Henry Cavill's mustache could not be contained by mere human CGI pic.twitter.com/TnxdpbeNVT

— Zack (@Blankzilla) November 16, 2017

Oh I see they hired Conan's team to remove Cavill's mustache using the best computer technologies pic.twitter.com/XrHd4g86Kg

— ben burbank (@bburbank) November 17, 2017

This is really disturbing. The CGI reshoots of Henry Cavill as Superman in #JusticeLeague make him look like human Shrek. pic.twitter.com/jM9kSuVDKn

— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) November 18, 2017

paramount not letting henry cavill shave his mustache for justice league because of mission impossible six, thus costing WB millions, is a legendary flex and i respect it so much

— ☕netw3rk (@netw3rk) November 20, 2017

I for one do not agree with WB’s decision to replace Henry Cavill’s mustache with Christopher Plummer pic.twitter.com/YnVY8T5ueB

— JawnJawn Binks (@FanSince09) November 17, 2017

Can't wait for the part in Justice League where the new guy rips off his mustache and reveals he's Superman. pic.twitter.com/C3HYZFDOTh

— Jesse McLaren (@McJesse) November 15, 2017