I’ve looked into a lot of the advancing technology, and it does indeed bode well for the future of fan edits.

I myself, had an idea of restoring cut scenes from ‘The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly’ with deepfakes of the original actors’ voices.

I recall seeing something recently that was for use in the context of “dubbed” films; essentially allowing the new dubbed voice to change the on-screen character/actor’s mouth and expressions (to an extent) to flow better with the dialogue. It was quite intriguing. That could go back to something like a Spaghetti Western to sync and adjust the mouth movements (though I quite like the charm of those films, it almost seems sacrilegious to “fix” them).

The limitations (at the moment) seem to be the extremes. Once the expressions of the face go beyond that of the original actor, it starts to look off. Like the video example above. De Niro goes from looking quite believable to doing that Mummy face.

The really exciting part of all of this, is that a lot of the very convincing technology is available to regular people.