As you know, Bruce Willis announced a few months ago that he was suffering from an illness that forced him to hang up his boots and stop shooting movies. Something that, obviously, saddened his legion of fans who have followed in his footsteps for more than three decades. Even so, and despite being retired, they still make him responsible for small miracles that he himself was not aware of having performed. Like that of selling the image rights of future digital doubles created with Deepfake technologies.
Nothing to sell your face
The fact is that some time ago we learned that Bruce Willis had starred in a funny advertising spot in Russia, for the company Megafon, almost a year ago, which was made entirely thanks to deepfake techniques by which an actor was later replaced by the face of the protagonist of The jungle of crystal. That was already news at the time because it meant that the interpreter himself was leaving an important part of his image rights in the hands of others, but it was not the first step in anything related to the recurrent marketing of his face as a resource to use. in any type of audiovisual content.
Russian firm Deepcake used an authorized deepfake of the Bruce Willis in the commercial for telecoms company Megafon. The company uses an artificial neural network to impose Willis’ image onto the face of a Russian actor https://t.co/7bizoLsk2S
September 22, 2021 • 06:20
Thus, it has been the agent of the actor himself who has come out to the media to deny that extreme that the image rights to make digital doubles have been negotiated in such a generic way. Even something similar exists. Speaking to the BBC, a legal spokesman for the interpreter confirmed that there was “no partnership or agreement” with the company responsible for Deepfakes.
That’s the way it is, Bruce Willis has not sold his image rights to anyone and, therefore, they continue to belong to him, so in the future it could be the case of repeating the experience of the Russian telephone company that used his face in this way, but through a specific agreement. Nothing of a big contract contemplating a future exploitation of the actor’s face, so that news that he is the first to do it… it turns out that nothing at all.
Sidelined due to speech problems
As you know, Bruce Willis reported almost six months ago that the doctors had diagnosed him with aphasiaa disorder that affects speech and that prevents him from understanding and reproducing both spoken and written language and, therefore, he had no choice but to announce a premature retirement from the stage when he was barely 67 years old.
Although almost all of us remember him for his participation in the films of The jungle of crystal, his true claim to fame came with the mid-1980s television series Moonlight, who starred alongside Cybill Shepherd and that was the one that really raised him to fame. Later they had hits like Blind Datecomedy directed by Blake Edwards, or The jungle of crystal that confirmed the actor as one of the most successful of those years in Hollywood.
Although without a doubt, many of you will have him in your saint list for successes such as The sixth Sense… right?
