Lionsgate ‘Deepfakes’ Expletives To Achieve Safe PG-13 Movie Rating

With music, artists can just re-record profanity-filled songs to produce “clean” versions. If you were a filmmaker, however, pulling something like that is going to burn a large hole in your budget.

Fall, the new action thriller that’s being released by Lionsgate Movies, is peppered with F-bombs, and little wonder—it follows two young women (played by Grace Caroline Currey and Virginia Gardner) who are trapped at the top of a 2,000-foot-tall radio tower, a terrifying situation that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemies.

Naturally, there’s a lot of swearing. But as realistic as this reaction is, some viewers might find it inappropriate for younger audience members. As such, Fall had gotten an R rating in US theaters even though it could have received a PG-13 score, Variety reports.

That would have severely affected the film’s earnings. In hopes to get a PG-13 rating, Lionsgate ended up utilizing deepfake-like technology to replace cuss words in Fall.

Reshooting affected scenes wasn’t possible as Fall was a low-budget production, director Scott Mann shares with Variety. The most economical way, it seemed, was to turn to artificial intelligence.

It’s a good thing Mann is also the co-CEO of TrueSync AI-powered company Lawless, which specializes in realistically dubbing films in different languages. To do this, the technology alters mouth movements so that they mimic translated scripts.

Now, when Fall takes to the silver screen on August 12, it will have a PG-13 rating.

 “What really saved this movie and brought it into a wider audience was technology,” Mann shares with the news outlet.

[via IGN and MovieWeb, video and cover image via Lionsgate Movies]