When Marvel announced that ‘Captain Marvel’ would take place in the 1990s and feature a younger Nick Fury and Phil Coulson, I did not at first think too much about the fact that this would mean that Marvel would be de-aging Samuel L. Jackson and Clark Gregg for most of the film to match their age in the story (both have held up remarkably well over the years). But a new screen grab released by Samuel L. Jackson on his Instagram account reveals Marvel’s use of their de-aging technology on him, and for once, it actually looks pretty good.
Now don’t get me wrong, this is a single frame from the movie, and one that could have been cleaned up a lot before he posted it, but if the rest of the movie’s version of Nick Fury looks as good as this two-eyed young Samuel L. Jackson, I will be very impressed with the digital wizards working on ‘Captain Marvel.’
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Wow, this Marvel de-aging thing is doper than I thought!#twoeyedfury#captainmarvelmovie
Marvel has toyed with this effect before, with young Tony Stark in ‘Captain America: Civil War,’ where some of the uncanny valley-ness could be explained away because the “young Tony” we saw was a computer projection created by adult Tony Stark, and we saw it used again in the original ‘Ant Man’ with Young Hank Pym, where it looked slightly better but still did not look like an effect that could be believed for an entire movie. The best use of a digital effect on a character for an extended period of time in a film was in the original ‘Captain America: The First Avenger,’ where they made Chris Evans shorter, thinner and smaller for the first 1/3 of the movie, and that looked surprisingly good, so I suppose it should not be that hard to accept that this technology has been in the works for some time.
What are your thoughts on the de-aged Samuel L. Jackson in the picture above? Do you think Marvel has the technology worked out enough to carry a film? Feel free to share your opinions in the comments below!