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
Ghoulish.
I hope no one watches this, simply out of basic respect for the dead.
But if anybody does go to see it, it would be interesting to interview them all to get a character/personality profile of the types who’d go to see this disrespectful disgraceful thing
Something Something beating a dead ai horse
I mean, this isn’t really a new thing, they did the same with Paul Walker for Fast and Furious
No, no, no and no
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.
Well, that’s creepy af
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.
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.
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.
It’s just cheaper and people are not yet accepting AI actors, so bringing back a known actor is step 1.
Studios would LOVE to replace all the actors and writers with cheap AI slop.
I mean they already tried and faced massive backlash. So they’re going about it more carefully now.
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.
Wait…
Val Kilmer is dead?
Unfortunately
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”
How does that make it not ghoulish?
The victim had a choice.
When the Lich King gives you a choice, its ethical necromancy.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like the perfect movie to never watch.
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.
That’s the flow of the world. The vast majority doesn’t know and doesn’t care. We all get what we deserve in the end though…
No, we just get what we get.
Well in the context of using shitty things that will shit on us in the end, it’s what we deserve too :)
Why? Its basically tautological that using shitty things will lead to shitty outcomes, we wouldn’t call them shitty in the first place otherwise, but what’s the mechanism by which this causes the users of those shitty things to deserve that outcome?
The mechanism? Ignorance. In the simple sense of “play stupid games, win stupid prices”. If you use a thing you absolutely don’t understand, and it bites you in the ass…well?
That just describes that doing some thing, the “stupid games”, merely causes some negative effect, the “stupid prizes”, not that the person playing those games deserves the results of their actions. To put it another way, if they deserve them, then if hypothetically speaking the person plays the stupid games but for some reason the stupid prizes never result, then there is something morally wrong with that situation and the world would be better had things gone as expected. If they dont deserve them, then the person playing the stupid games just got lucky that time and thered be no benefit to trying to force the negative result that didnt happen to occur after all.
I really don’t get your point. In the sense of playing stupid games, they usually do result in stupid prices. With rare exceptions maybe, which won’t influence the point at all. If you do a thing out of ignorance and reap unwanted side-effects, you well deserve those side-effects for lack of informing yourself.
