It's rather well-known Tom Selleck was nearly cast as Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and while that never came to be in reality, we now know what it would have looked like. As the legend goes, Selleck had auditioned for the original Indy movie, along with other name actors like Peter Coyote, John Shea, and Tim Matheson.
Tom Selleck was then offered the lead role, but because of his commitment to his TV series Magnum P.I., the actor wound up turning it down. Perhaps wondering what could have been, the YouTube channel Sham00K uploaded an all-new "deepfake" video of Selleck as Indiana Jones, and to be honest, it's rather convincing. You can take a look at the video below.
As we all know now, Harrison Ford was the actor who would land the iconic role of Indiana Jones, and most fans of the franchise certainly wouldn't have it any other way. The director of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Steven Spielberg, had seen the potential in Ford early into production, and had even suggested using Ford for the lead role to character creator George Lucas. Initially, Lucas balked at this idea, suggesting they go with a lesser-known actor instead of the Star Wars franchise star. With just three weeks left to go before the start of production, however, Lucas finally agreed to the casting with some additional persuasion from producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall. Whatever the sequence of events was that led to Ford's casting, it definitely seems like it was meant to be.
After Raiders of the Lost Ark was released in 1981, it instantly established the Indiana Jones character as one of the most popular movie personalities of all time. Its success brought about the prequel Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984 and the sequel Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1989, and the three installments of the trilogy are still widely considered to be among the very best movies ever made. Of course, when the fourth installment Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was released in 2008, it fared far worse critically than all three of its predecessors. Still, the movie was a tremendous success at the box office, pulling in $786 million in ticket sales against its budget of $185 million. An untitled fifth installment of the franchise is currently in the works.
Similar deepfake videos have become a bit of an internet phenomenon. Obviously, the idea behind them involved talented editors digitally replacing the faces of movie characters with other actors to show how an alternate casting might have looked. Some of the most popular ones to be released include Jim Carrey replacing Jack Nicholson in The Shining, Sylvester Stallone replacing Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Will Smith playing Neo instead of Keanu Reeves in The Matrix.
All we're left to wonder now is which interesting deepfake videos we might see next. They're certainly very entertaining, and especially so for movie buffs who spend way too much time thinking about these kinds of alternate castings. You know, people like me. The deepfake video of Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones comes to us from Sham00K on YouTube.