Doug Liman's 'Bitcoin' Recreates Bezos, Zuckerberg and Putin Using AI

A May 22, 2026 Deadline exclusive confirmed that Doug Liman's feature Bitcoin uses AI to recreate Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Eric Trump as on-screen characters. It is the first public confirmation of which specific living public figures appear in a guild-aligned Hollywood feature, and the first time a production of this scale has named the AI methodology used to put them on screen.

The film stars Casey Affleck, Pete Davidson, Gal Gadot, and Isla Fisher. It was previously known as Killing Satoshi before a title change ahead of its Cannes market run.

Who Appears and How

Mark Zuckerberg has the most dialogue of any AI recreated figure in the film. Jeff Bezos, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Eric Trump all appear as characters. Eric Trump is depicted promoting "Trump coin" in scenes that also involve a stripper. Elon Musk has a fleeting reference.

The performers on camera undergo AI enhancement to resemble the specific public figures. According to Deadline's coverage, approvals for AI alterations "had already been agreed" per prior casting notices. That is the legal basis the production is working from: agreements secured during casting rather than clearances negotiated portrait by portrait after the fact.

The Technology Stack

The production uses a markerless performative capture stage, which means no location shooting. Performers act on the stage and the environment and character likeness are applied in post. The technology combines Ryan Kavanaugh's ACME AI with Liman's own proprietary PECAN process, short for Performance Capture Animation.

There are no suits or tracking markers. The system reads performer movement and facial expression directly, then maps the AI generated likeness on top. The result is a complete separation of performance from appearance: the cast performs, the AI produces the faces.

Guild Compliance and the Public Figures Question

The film "is understood to align with the AI guidelines of the Hollywood guilds", per Deadline. The SAG-AFTRA 2026 studios deal requires an "articulable business reason" before a producer can scan a performer to create a digital replica, and it forbids using those replicas to replace workers during a strike.

But those protections cover guild members: the cast. Bezos, Zuckerberg, Putin, and Kim Jong Un are not SAG-AFTRA members. Their recreations sit in a different legal category, governed by right of publicity laws, defamation law, and the specific contractual language from the casting notices. California's digital replica statutes address some of this for state residents, but the laws are untested at the scale of a $70 million feature deploying AI recreations of multiple named sitting and former heads of state and global business figures simultaneously.

The production's position is that the casting notice agreements provide the necessary authorization. Whether that holds is a question no court has answered, because no comparable production has existed before.

What This Establishes

This is the first Hollywood feature at this budget level to publicly name which living public figures appear as AI characters, and to describe the specific technology stack used to produce those appearances. Prior AI productions have avoided naming real people in AI generated roles. The Bitcoin team has gone the opposite direction.

The film's technical approach, separating performance from likeness entirely through the PECAN and ACME AI pipeline, is likely to become a reference point for how producers approach similar productions. The legal framework it is operating in, built from casting notice language and right of publicity precedent, is equally likely to face scrutiny before distribution.

Filmmakers exploring AI production tools at any scale can access current video and image generation models through AI FILMS Studio.

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Sources

Deadline | The Wrap | Variety | The Hollywood Reporter | IndieWire