Trey Parker and Matt Stone had to scrap a Donald Trump deepfake movie due to COVID

Back in late 2020, we got a surprise video from the South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. While we were all eagerly awaiting to see how they’d tackle COVID, we got something else entirely: Sassy Justice.

Sassy Justice was a one-off parody show that was satirizing the world of deepfakes. It was funny and even featured some scarily accurate deepfakes, including that of Donald Trump, voiced by Peter Serafinowicz. They even founded a new production company for their deepfakes, Deep VooDoo.

Turns out, there was originally going to be so much more.

“Not a lot of people know that we were a day away from starting production on the first feature movie we had done since ‘Team America: World Police,’” Parker said in a new interview with the LA Times. “We were going to start shooting on the day that the pandemic shut everything down. It was months and months of getting ready for that movie, to just being like, ‘Nope, it’s over.’ I went to the office to start packing up my things because I was just kind of in shock.”

“It was going to be ‘Deep Fake: The Movie,’” Parker said. “It was about this guy who looked exactly like Trump because we deep fake Trump’s face onto him. And it was this whole funny thing because, of course, it ends up with Trump just naked and getting run through the wringer and everything, and that’s why it was so funny and so timely.”

As for the future of the project, it’s now been put “on hold,” given that the project relies on timeliness – and obviously Donald Trump. But with Trump teasing another run for office, they say it could happen again. So we’ll just have to wait and see…