Marvel’s habit of de-ageing its veteran Hollywood stars is now something of an obsession. First, in 2016, there was Robert Downey Jr as a slightly weird-looking teenage version of Tony Stark in flashback scenes from Captain America: Civil War. Then there was 1970s, Bee Gee-barneted Kurt Russell in last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2. And this week we saw the debut trailer for next March’s Captain Marvel, featuring a version of Samuel L Jackson’s Nick Fury restored to his 1990s prime for the period-set superhero epic.
Marvel simply cannot resist flinging a paint-bucketful of pixels over any actor over 55, like a kid messing around on Photoshop. Prior to Captain Marvel, the technology has been used primarily for flashback scenes, which are often so stylised and filtered to distinguish them from the “present day” that the faces’ washed-out glaze barely matters. In Captain Marvel, however, Jackson reportedly appears as his younger self for the entire movie.
If Marvel falls short on even a few seconds of rendered footage, the experience could be highly distracting. But if the studio gets it right, there is potential for further “flashback” movies to follow: After being de-aged for scenes in Ant-Man and recent sequel Ant-Man and the Wasp, Michael Douglas has already said he would be keen to return as “young” Hank Pym. It is hard to imagine that Harrison Ford would not sign up in a heartbeat to return as digitally de-aged Han Solo, and even harder to imagine a scenario in which any such movie, decently realised, would not fare better with audiences than Solo: A Star Wars Story. The reaction to Ron Howard’s film made it very clear that Ford is the only space scoundrel anyone really cares about.
Jackson may well be a better test subject. Most of us don’t know how he looked or sounded in his perky youth: he only rose to stardom in his mid-40s. And Jackson has aged well, his looks and voice changing only subtly.
By contrast, one imagines Douglas’s hopes of starring as a young Pym might suffer from the fact that he simply looks and sounds very different to the way he did in the 1980s – as is perfectly natural. Marvel would have to go some way to capture the charisma and youthful vigour of Douglas in Romancing the Stone. It might even need to develop new tech to de-age voices.
There are other issues. Audiences may enjoy short bursts of their favourite stars restored to their peppy youth, but will they sit through an entire movie centred on an actor who has been plunged into the digital fountain of youth? Can an actor exude sex appeal if we know they are a lot more wrinkly than they appear?
Marvel, like Lucasfilm with its resurrection of Peter Cushing for Star Wars: Rogue One, has been using “ghosting” tech – loosely the superimposing of a famous older actor’s features over those of a younger actor performing in mo-cap – to achieve its results. The prospect of sex scenes using such techniques is icky to say the least.
Perhaps what Hollywood really requires is the development of a new “suspension of disbelief” technique – a mind-altering substance drizzled over audiences as they enter multiplexes to ensure they do not question the dubious reality before them. Move over Smellovision, the era of “Sprayovision” awaits …
