Inside YouTube’s Weird World Of Fake AI-Fuelled Movie Trailers

EXCLUSIVE: David Corenswet’s Superman lies on the ground, an open wound on his chest wells with blood. Cut to Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor watching on and Milly Alcock’s Supergirl levitating into view. “They are not from here,” Luthor intones in an ominous voiceover. “And they will never be.” Cue thunderous music, the DC logo, and an aerial shot of the Daily Planet. Your new Superman trailer just dropped.

Except this montage is all fake. It is the creation of a machine that can reassemble the Man of Steel in dazzling detail, but will never understand the human world that makes him so enduring. The trailer, which Frankensteins together fleeting AI shots with legitimate footage from the Superman trailer released in December, is one of countless bogus movie teasers to have flooded YouTube in recent years.

Most industry observers will recognize the pungent whiff of AI that YouTube’s algorithm lifts under the nose, but for some, the movie commercials can be indiscernible from the real deal. Even French national television was duped by a fake AI Superman trailer last year, showing clips of a besuited Corenswet months before any official footage had been released. Director James Gunn made his feelings pretty clear, posting three puking emojis alongside the France Télévisions clip. He may be surprised to learn, then, that Warner Bros. Discovery is quietly cashing in on some knock-off videos.

Instead of enforcing copyright on counterfeit commercials, Deadline can reveal that a handful of Hollywood studios are asking YouTube to ensure that the ad revenue made from views flows in their direction. Quite why they are doing this is a mystery (all the majors approached by Deadline declined to comment), but it raises questions about their willingness to take cash for content that exploits their IP and talent, at a time when there is an existential crisis about how copyright collides with AI. Actors’ union SAG-AFTRA describes our revelation as a “race to the bottom.”

Step back, and a more obvious question emerges: why are studios allowing fake trailers to flourish in the first place? Those who create these videos believe they help feed the movie promotion machine, but a sceptic might argue that the trailers could serve to degrade and cheapen official marketing material, potentially imperilling perceptions of the final movie.

And what of the fake trailer creators themselves? Some do it for fun, while others are building meaningful businesses. Either way, they are generating billions of views and making money. Welcome to YouTube’s weird world of fake film trailers. 

In The Beginning…

People have been posting fake trailers since the dawn of YouTube in 2005. One of the earliest examples to go viral was an imagined Titanic sequel, in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack Dawson is discovered in a block of ice under the ocean and is brought back to life in contemporary New York — all set to a thumping dance remix of Céline Dion’s My Heart Will Go On. The trailer was updated in 2018 by VJ4rawr2, an Australian YouTuber who is considered to be one of the Godfathers of so-called concept trailers. Titanic 2: Jack’s Back got 53M views before VJ4rawr2’s original video was blocked by 20th Century Fox. 

VJ4rawr2, who prefers not to disclose his real name, creates the trailers for fun, but was able to quit his job in 2015 to focus on YouTube, where he has amassed 393M views. His videos start with a central joke and use editing techniques and AI to tease a unique story. VJ4rawr2 has imagined a Mission: Impossible sequel in which Tom Cruise runs from New York to LA, while his most recent effort pictured Macaulay Culkin returning to his Home Alone house to confront his family about childhood abandonment.

If VJ4rawr2 was creating these trailers for laughs, artificial intelligence has changed the game in recent years. Fake trailer channels are using the technology to industrialize their output and piggyback on YouTube’s algorithm. Most videos posit a simple, enticing question: What would a live-action Frozen movie look like with Anya Taylor-Joy as Elsa? How would Leonardo DiCaprio fare if he entered Squid Game? Could Henry Cavill actually make a good James Bond? Sometimes, these trailers go viral enough to warrant press coverage, with the bogus Bond trailer prompting headlines in both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. 

There are big audiences for these videos, with many actively seeking out the simulacra. Other YouTube users hate-watch fake trailers and rage in the comments below. Some are completely fooled by what they are watching — particularly if they are not familiar with the telltale signs of generative AI. “My parents watched this and thought it was real,” one person noted on the DiCaprio Squid Game video. VJ4rawr2 says: “The majority of fan trailers today are only popular because they’ve effectively fooled people into thinking they’re real.”

Screen Culture is perhaps the best example of a channel that has professionalized its output with the help of AI. Based in Pune, a city southeast of Mumbai in India, is Nikhil P. Chaudhari, a 27-year-old entrepreneur who has turned his Hollywood geekery into a burgeoning business. After being gifted a laptop as a child, Chaudhari (who likes to be known as Nick), has been obsessed with movie culture and amateur video editing. His skills combined in 2018 when he launched the Screen Culture channel, initially posting cut-together conversations between comedy characters, such as his debut video: Chandler Bing Vs Sheldon Cooper.

Speaking to Deadline over Zoom, Chaudhari says he noticed other accounts creating concept trailers and thought he could do a better job. He began with clunky mash-ups, including imagining an Avengers-style cut of Game of Thrones, before graduating to more sophisticated videos. Although Chaudhari was initially unhappy about AI lowering the barrier to entry to the concept trailer community, he had little choice but to embrace the technology if he was going to compete for YouTube real estate. 

Unlike VJ4rawr2, or the outlandish videos of DiCaprio Squid Game creator KH Studio (viewcount: 556M), Screen Culture leans into films that are actually happening. Narrowing in on franchises and sequels, Chaudhari researches and iterates around upcoming movies, creating trailers that are difficult to differentiate from the real deal. They borrow heavily from official footage, but splice in AI imagery to tease irresistible details about a movie that appeal to their giant fandoms. “Our goal was to create videos that were as close to an official trailer as a concept trailer could be,” he says. Chaudhari now oversees a team of a dozen editors, who churn out as many as 12 videos a week based on his instructions.

The Industrialization Of Fake Trailers

Screen Culture has created 23 versions of a trailer for The Fantastic Four: First Steps over the past year. When Deadline searched YouTube using a private browsing tool in February, two of Screen Culture’s fake Fantastic Four videos ranked higher than the official trailer, which had been posted by Marvel just days earlier. The first search result was Screen Culture’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps | New Trailer video, which contains obvious AI images of Galactus, even though the cosmic bad guy has not been fully pictured in official material. The second search result, another similar Screen Culture offering, used AI to tease the yet-to-be-seen female Silver Surfer.

Being early to a topic can help push a video up YouTube’s search ranking, while new videos are often boosted, which is why Screen Culture hits certain franchises fast and hard. Deadline searches found Screen Culture had high-ranking results for many major upcoming movies, including Thunderbolts* and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, with all the videos embellished using AI. YouTube’s algorithm also rewarded some videos by pushing them into its recommendation sidebar and ‘People Also Search For’ menu. YouTube was approached for comment.

Chaudhari uses at least six AI tools to create his videos, including Leonardo, Midjourney, and ElevenLabs, the latter of which specializes in generative voiceover work. Since adopting the technology, Screen Culture’s views and subscribers have more than doubled in the past two years to 1.4B and 1.4M respectively. The channel is verified by YouTube, giving it a veneer of authenticity, while Chaudhari proudly displays his YouTube gold award for hitting 1M subscribers. The success has translated into millions of dollars of ad revenue, though Chaudhari is coy about exactly how much he is earning. On his Instagram account, he looks every inch the affluent online influencer, flaunting his supercars and luxury travel escapades. 

Chaudhari does have his admirers. “He’s probably the first person I know who treated the fan trailer genre seriously and built up a team around it,” says VJ4rawr2. Others are uncertain about the influence of AI. The Yeti, a movie culture channel (viewcount: 30M) that dabbles in fake trailers, says the technology has “ruined” the art form of concept commercials.

Screen Culture’s videos are not titled with “official” or “concept” trailer. Instead, it operates in a gray area, headlining videos “new” or “first,” before making clear in the small print description that it is not the real deal. Chaudhari says most YouTube users understand that Screen Culture is not stocked with official videos and that people can find the legitimate trailer by searching for the official channel. For those who are fooled by his trailers, Chaudhari exclaims: “What’s the harm?” 

What’s The Harm?

He believes that Screen Culture helps promote the movies, which is why studios do not enforce copyright on the vast majority of his videos. Indeed, studios are actively taking a cut of his earnings on AI-fuelled trailers, even if the money is paltry in the grand scheme of their earnings. Emails reviewed by Deadline show how Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) has claimed monetization on Screen Culture trailers for Superman and House of the Dragon. This means that instead of copyright striking the videos (if a channel accrues three strikes within 90 days, it can be banned from YouTube), WBD is asking YouTube to ensure it receives the ad revenue from views. Similarly, Sony Pictures has claimed revenue on fake trailers for Spider-Man and Kraven The Hunter, while Paramount did the same on a counterfeit Gladiator II video. WBD, Sony, and Paramount declined to comment.

If Chaudhari’s position is that his videos are not harmful, SAG-AFTRA disagrees. In a statement shared with Deadline, it admonishes studios for making money on videos that exploit its members without permission. “Just as SAG-AFTRA is aggressively bargaining contract terms and creating laws to protect and enforce our members’ voice and likeness rights, we expect our bargaining partners to aggressively enforce their IP from any, and all AI misappropriation,” the union says. “Monetizing unauthorized, unwanted, and subpar uses of human-centered IP is a race to the bottom. It incentivizes technology companies and short-term gains at the expense of lasting human creative endeavor.”

Things get murkier when you consider that some channels actively sex-up images of female characters in fake trailers. Screen Culture is not averse to this engagement bait, creating an AI thumbnail of Riley Andersen with cleavage for an imagined Inside Out 3 sequel. Chaudhari defends the image, saying it is a plausible storyline as Andersen gets older. “Every single studio is misogynistic, hence we don’t really pay attention to critics,” he adds.

Chaudhari’s impression is that copyright is being enforced inconsistently, with monetization claims only being made on an estimated 10% of Screen Culture’s 2,700 videos. WBD did copyright strike the channel once in 2023 for a fake Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga trailer, but let subsequent Mad Max videos slide. Chaudhari received a polite email from an Amazon attorney to remove a The Boys trailer because it used “Amazon trademarks and other intellectual property assets without Amazon’s permission,” but this warning was not repeated for other bogus Boys trailers on Screen Culture. Disney very rarely copyright challenges Screen Culture’s videos, despite its IP being a major resource for the channel. Disney declined to comment.

Fake trailers on YouTube are not a new phenomenon, but they are increasing in number and sophistication. At the same time, trailers have become an ever-more important part of the movie marketing machine, with studios crowing about record views in the hope this translates into cinema ticket sales or subscriptions. In public at least, the studios appear to be responding with a collective shrug to what some regard as AI slop on YouTube, despite CEOs like Bob Iger opining about the need to protect IP and respect talent. Even the studios’ trade body, the Motion Picture Association, declined to comment for this article.

Meanwhile, wily creators like Chaudhari will continue to stand on the shoulders of filmmakers like James Gunn and get billions of views by playing with AI immitations of their characters. Even Superman is not immune from the machine.