EXCLUSIVE: Hold onto your crypto. This could get interesting.

It turns out Doug Liman‘s much-discussed AI-enabled satire Bitcoin, starring Casey Affleck, Pete Davidson, Gal Gadot and Isla Fisher, will also have some well known supporting characters.

Versions of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and Eric Trump are due to populate the movie, which follows a man’s quest to prove he created Bitcoin, a claim that puts his life in peril and sets off a high-stakes race between tech billionaires and world leaders with the financial system hanging in the balance.

We understand Bezos, Zuckerberg et al have initially been portrayed by actors on camera but the performances will likely go through some level of AI enhancement in order to better resemble the real things. Approvals from those actors to undergo AI changes have already been agreed, according to previous casting notices.

We understand Zuckerberg has the most lines of the public figures, while Eric Trump, the businessman and political activist second son of President Trump, will be featured as hawking “Trump coin” and in one scene is depicted as being in the orbit of a stripper. There will also be a fleeting nod to Elon Musk in the movie. This is all according to the script, at least. The final movie could always look differently.

None of the figures are ‘main’ characters, but we remember how Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice went down with the Trumps. As in that instance, we hear the Bitcoin team has done plenty of due diligence with lawyers and are leaning into the project as satire, just like SNL or South Park does. Either way, a much-discussed project has added more lightning rods to its armory.

The project has generated headlines in recent months for its prominent use of AI. The movie will employ a “markerless performative capture stage” instead of any location-shooting. According to Liman, the AI tech means the film can be made at — a still hefty — $70M rather than $200M or $300M.

For its AI, the filmmakers are tapping into producer Ryan Kavanaugh’s own proprietary AI within his ACME AI label, as well as Liman’s proprietary PECAN (Performance Capture Animation) process. The film is understood to align with the AI guidelines of the Hollywood guilds.

The film sees Hollywood vet Liman reconnect with Oscar winner Affleck who stars as computer scientist Craig Wright. The duo previously worked on 2024 Apple pic The Instigators. Davidson plays blockchain investor Calvin Ayre, while Gadot is Charlotte “Lotte” Miller. The film was written by WGA Award winner Nick Schenk (Gran Torino) and produced by Ryan Kavanaugh and Lawrence Grey. The movie is in post and Patrick Wachsberger’s 193 was selling at the Cannes market.

Australian computer scientist and businessman Wright has publicly claimed to be the main part of the team that created the billion dollar business bitcoin, and the identity behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. The claims have been regarded as false by many in the cryptocurrency community and in 2024 the British High Court ruled that Wright is not Nakamoto and must stop saying he is so.

Wachsberger previously described the film as “an exciting and gripping story, set in the mysterious and high-stakes real world of crypto.”

The film is the highest-profile producing return for Kavanaugh, the once high-flying Relativity Media boss who helped finance films including The Social Network, The Fighter and The Fast and the Furious before the studio imploded in 2015. Kavanaugh has become a cryptocurrency proponent in recent years.