How de-aging in movies got so good

In 2025, Tom Hanks is 67 years old. Yet, in his latest film Here (directed by Robert Zemeckis), he’s convincingly transformed to appear as young as 18, and aged even beyond his current years. And the effect actually looks … good!

But de-aging effects haven’t always looked this good. Attempts at de-aging can be seen as early as 2006 — and since then filmmakers have experimented with tools and had … varying degrees of success. While 2D blurring and enhancement was the first iteration, realistic de-aging in motion required 3D methods — but no matter which way you sliced it, the process remained labor-intensive and results were often somewhere between okay and the uncanny valley.

Here’s VFX supervisor Kevin Baillie told me that the current versions of these tools weren’t going to work on the movie. There were too many shots, and the results were too inconsistent for the quality level they were striving toward. So the filmmaking team looked elsewhere, to the bleeding edge of AI tools, to see what was possible. By feeding it a wealth of images featuring Tom Hanks and co-stars Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, and Kelly Reilly, they found they could create images that were remarkably realistic, streamlining the once arduous process.

But the true game changer was optimizing the speed of this tool to enable a real-time feed on set. This empowered actors, costume designers, makeup artists, hairstylists, and other crew members to ensure that every version of the characters, at any age, felt authentic and believable.

If you want to learn more about how all this was pulled off, check out Vox Video’s latest!