On December 23, Facebook accounts and pages (1,2,3,4,5) disseminated the information that the American internet television network “Netflix” is working on a film about Vladimir Lenin, in which actor Leonardo DiCaprio will play the leading role. The posts are accompanied by a movie poster featuring Leonardo DiCaprio. The posts also claim that the Russian communists object to the fact and in a letter addressed to “Netflix,” they demand that a Russian actor play the role of Lenin, otherwise they threaten to block the screening of the film in Russian cinem
The claim that Steven Spielberg is making a film about Lenin is false. The photo with Spielberg and DiCaprio’s names was created by actor Deividas Breivė in 2017, while the rest of the photos were created using artificial intelligence and belong to Reddit user MJ_GhostWind.
One of the published photos shows the name of the film “Lenin”, as well as the name and surname of the director – Steven Spielberg. In fact, the photo is not a real movie poster, it was created by Lithuanian actor Deividas Breivė and published on his Facebook page on October 14, 2017. In the description of the actor’s post, we read that he dedicated the poster to DiCaprio, who has repeatedly said in the past that he would play the role of Lenin, and Spielberg was chosen because he is good at biographical films. On October 20 of the same year, Breivė published another poster featuring British actor Daniel Radcliffe. According to the poster, Radcliffe will play the role of Leon Trotsky in the movie “Lenin.”
The Lithuanian actor also sent DiCaprio’s poster to Facebook page Soviet Visuals and confirmed to them that the poster was created by him.
The mentioned poster was also distributed in Russian-language social networks (1,2) and several more posters appeared with the image of Selma Hayek, Scarlett Johansson and other Hollywood celebrities.
As for the rest of the photos used in the posts spread on Facebook, they were created by Reddit user MJ_GhostWind using the artificial intelligence program Midjourney and published them on subreddit.
The post combines 8 artificially created photos of DiCaprio. In the comments, the user explained in detail how he created them.
Therefore, none of the photos used in the posts are real movie posters and all of them were created by Internet users.
Leonardo DiCaprio indeed expressed his desire to play the role of Lenin in the past. In 2016, the actor told the German publication Welt that there should be more films about Russian history and that he would play Putin, Rasputin or Lenin himself. The Russian film studio “Lenfilm” responded to the statement and expressed its desire to make a film with DiCaprio’s participation, which was followed by a protest from the “Communist Party of St. Petersburg”.
Information that “Lenfilm”, “Netflix” or Steven Spielberg are actually shooting a similar film with DiCaprio’s participation cannot be found in open sources.
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