Kilmer passed away in 2025 after battling throat cancer. Apparently his character will feature in over an hour of the movie.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/val-kilmer-ai-generated-new-movie-rcna264195
They've finally done it. Even if You're dead, you still have to fucking go to work.
Which was the point of the movie Robocop, and he got featured in the reboot of it.
The dead can't organize labor unions either.
So they're just making money over a dead guy's likeness. Business as usual then.
He was going to play the role before he died, and they decided to use AI to recreate his likeness instead of recasting.
So not quite as ghoulish as you might think.
How does that make it not ghoulish?
Not quite as ghoulish. Say 99% as ghoulish.
Exactly. I'm not saying it's fine, just not as terrible as you might originally think.
I’m not sure if that’s a distinction worth making in this case
I'm not sure if this was a comment worth making, yet here you are.
I suppose time will tell ;)
“We were gonna skin Val and attach that to an advanced robotics puppet, but the studio said that was 100% ghoulish.”
"oddly, he had that explicitly prohibited in his will"
So just holding him to his contractual obligations after death then?
That's not making it any better.
Will his estate see the amount he was contractually obligated for revenue, etc?
I'd imagine so, yes.
In that context, that's more ghoulish.
Did anyone ask him if he thought this was ok?
From what I read, Kilmer gave the filmmakers the right to use his likeness for this purpose.
This is so weird to me. Are we really at a point where we need recreate old, dead actors instead of giving new actors a shot?
Like could you imagine if we had this technology a hundred years ago and just decided that Charlie Chaplin was the best, so let's just clone his likeness and put him in everything? You'd never have a John Wayne, a Robert DeNiro, a Harrison Ford, or a Tom Hanks. Just a recreation of Charlie Chaplin in every major movie - because it's cheaper and less risky to recreate someone old with AI than it is to take a chance on someone new.
This timeline is dumb as hell.
In fairness to the studio, he had accepted the role before he became ill and was unable to actually film for the role. They also had the permission of his family, and I believe the actor himself.
Issue is, movie execs see even CinemaSins style critique as valid, so they try their best to avoid "the protagonist looks different from what he looked like in the previous episode ding". They even tanked SW IX to try to win over chuds, only to alienate everyone.
I would say that if no one paid to see the movie maybe studios would quit doing this, but there are usually a lot of people who don't know or don't care about any given shitty thing, so things get slowly worse.
Usually i wonder "Oh, xyz is still alive?", feels werid to wonder "Oh, xyz is dead? When did that happen?"
Is this a getting-old thing? :(
I’m 55 and wonder both. I think it’s a realizing your own mortality thing.
Dude had a lot of health problems. Top Gun was his last hurrah, and it was difficult for him. It's why his screen time was so short, and why they ended up honoring him with a funeral scene. If I remember correctly, he died while the film was being made, so they added that scene last minute.
Top Gun was his last hurrah
For a minute I thought you meant the original Top Gun, and I was thinking "well Batman Forever kinda sucked, yeah, but you've obviously never seen Tombstone" then I realized you meant the "Maverick" movie. I never watched it and didn't even know he was in it.
realized you meant the “Maverick” movie. I never watched it and didn’t even know he was in it.
He was for a brief moment.
js let actors (really, anyone for that matter) die in peace bruh 😭😭🙏
A cousin of mine died about a year ago, after a long struggle with cancer. “She” still posts on Facebook. It makes me sick.
Is this Facebook doing this, or a family member posting on their behalf?
None of our family would impersonate her.
https://futurism.com/future-society/meta-patented-ai-die-keeps-posting
These articles claim Facebook has no plans to use this patent, but this is very mich like what I’m seeing.
Well, that's creepy af
that doesn't even look like him.
It looks like someone tried to make Tom Cruise look like Val Kilmer.
Maybe if we see an era of AI reducing people’s individuality and throwing them all into an uncanny valley of blended-together appearances, we’ll wind up with a resurgence of interest in actors with atypical features.
Maybe from the early 90s
Something Something beating a dead ai horse
Ghoulish.
If they're going to use AI for actors, how about we start with replacing child actors? Between Hollywood's shitty treatment of children, the effects that fame has on developmental growth, and the pure cost of hiring children (who have shorter work hours and thus tend to increase the time required to film/produce), it would make a lot more sense to replace kids on screen with a bot than attempting to raise adult actors from the dead.
I'm no fan of AI, but considering how much child abuse happens behind the scenes, using it to reduce the need for child actors is one application I'd feel at least somewhat okay with. But this? It just feels disrespectful to the dead actor. Holograms of dead people was bad enough, now we need to recreate entire films with them?
Half the point of Hollywood is abuse. Literally that's the reason investment ever went into the idea. No one just provides bread and circuses, and just one justification is no where near good enough to excuse the massive costs.
Oy. Soon we're gonna have a separate word for films that starred a particular actor when they were actually alive, as distinguished from the rest of the films starring them.
I should rewatch The Congress.
Perhaps AI Kilmer will do interviews as well.
Can't wait for the Hot Ones version of AI Kilmer. 🙄
Can’t read that and not say Al Kilmer in my head
I mean, this isn't really a new thing, they did the same with Paul Walker for Fast and Furious
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