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 mean, this isn’t really a new thing, they did the same with Paul Walker for Fast and Furious
No, no, no and no
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”
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like the perfect movie to never watch.
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? :(
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.
I’m 55 and wonder both. I think it’s a realizing your own mortality thing.
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.
The Critic called it in 1994.
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
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
Wait…
Val Kilmer is dead?
Unfortunately
