Retcasting

Have you ever watched a movie? Thought to yourself, that movie would be perfect if it starred these people instead of those people? I have often had that thought.

Many times I find myself doing creative recasting in my head, and I imagine what the film would have been like with my ideal cast. To describe this, I coined the term retcasting, a shameless rip off of the word retconning.

I realize that the technology does not yet exist to go back and remake a movie with the cast of one’s choice. But artificial intelligence is getting better every year, and I would not be surprised if, within the next decade or so, we could choose any movie, from any era in history, and drop in our preferred favorite actors and actresses.

It would be especially interesting to mix together actors that actually lived at different times in film history. That could create a sort of tension as the acting styles meld together, as the AI does the best that it can to blend the results so has to fit the intention of the screenplay.

For now, perhaps, creative retcasting remains an idle daydream. But one day, it made very well become an art form in its own right.