The celluloid dead is always among us. They have been creeping around in our homes since television networks introduced reruns in the 1950s. Even the worst movies perform a certain kind of magic, trapping actors in time like insects in amber. But for decades, Hollywood has attempted to take this strange brush with immortality one step further. Ana de Armas toldAnOther Magazinethat just before production, the crew of the new Netflix original,Blonde(2022) asked forMonroe’s permissionto make the film, leaving a card full of heartfelt letters on her grave. Not only did the film’s director Andrew Dominik line up his close-up shots of Ana de Armas at eye level to maximize her physical resemblance to Marilyn Monroe, but he also filmed Monroe’s death scene in the actual house where the late actress died on Helena Avenue in Los Angeles.
Audiences appear to love it when Hollywood brings its dead back to life, with modern biopics likeBohemian Rhapsody(2018) grossing nearly a billion dollars andElvis(2022) taking in almost $300 million in the middle of a global pandemic. Stars Rami Malek and Austin Butler, respectively, garnered considerable praise for bringing their deceased pop culture icons back to life. While each actor had a leg up with certain physical features that resembled Freddy Mercury and Elvis Presley, these were enhanced by the excellent work of makeup artistslike Jan SewellonBohemian Rhapsody,who created 20 sets of Freddy Mercury teeth for Malek.
Update August 15, 2025: This article has been updated by Jack Deegan following the SAG-AFTRA Strike and more recent uses of the technology in films likeThe Flash.
But what would have happened if the filmmakers behindBohemian Rhapsody,Elvis, andBlondeelected to not merely enhance their lead actor’s physical resemblance to their real-life characters with practical makeup but to instead digitally replace their faces with the likenesses of Mercury, Presley, and Monroe? This has become a topic of discussion for ages now, and with the advent of CGI and deepfakes, this topic has only grown more heated. The idea of using CGI to bring back dead actors has become a controversial practice, and see in movies ranging fromStar Wars: The Rise of SkywalkertoGhostbusters: Afterlife, many rightfully feel uncomfortable with the practice. It is now at the heart of the ongoing SAG-AFTRA Strike.
Bruce Willis Is the Highest-Profile Hollywood Star to Dabble With CGI Cloning
Related:Bruce Willis and the Rise of CGI Movie Star Clones: Where Do We Draw the Line?
This is because Willis is the highest-profile Hollywood star so far to grant CGI cloning his blessing. But there are other filmmakers interested in its futuristic possibilities. Universal and Disney have already invested millions of dollars in this new technology, receiving a mix of praise and vitriol for their CGI resurrections of late actors Paul Walker inFurious 7(2015) and Peter Cushing inRogue One: A Star Wars Story(2016).
Chris Evans Decried a Film that Would Resurrect James Dean with CGI
In 2019, Anton Ernst and Tati Golykh announced their plans to direct an adaptation of a 2011 novel by Gareth Crocker,Finding Jack. To play the lead role of a soldier who refuses to leave his dog behind at the end of the Vietnam War, Ernst and Golykh obtained the likeness rights of an actor contemporary of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean. This was after Paul Newman’s estate passed on the opportunity to resurrect their handsome blue-eyed patriarch on the big screen, where he spent most of his life.
Though the shadow of Dean’s career has loomed large acrossHollywood history, the late actor only starred in three films before his untimely death in a car crash in 1955;Rebel Without a CauseandEast of Edenwas released in 1955 withGiantposthumously in 1956. So if Ernst and Golykh succeed,Finding Jackwould (sort of) become the fourth James Dean movie. Even though Dean’s estate signed off on the film, not everyone is happy about it. In 2019, Chris Evans took to Twitter to voice his opinion after the announcement of the CGI resurrection of James Dean.
While Chris Evans and many others have criticized its ethical gray area, seen purely from a filmmaking standpoint, the CGI resurrection of deceased actors is one of the most exciting technological innovations of the twenty-first century. While it is still in its infancy, this special effect will soon provide current and future filmmakers with a classic movie star dollhouse.
At its worst, Hollywood stands to tarnish the legacies of its greatest actors, as Chris Evans suggests. At its best, these CGI resurrections, coupled with other modern filmmaking techniques, could bring audiences immersive revisionist works in the vein of the old masters of cinema. Who is to stop them from tarnishing the good names of old Hollywood legends? In short, their estates.
The future use of this technology will likely provoke a larger discourse on the ethics of estates themselves, with celebrity families shining a light on the otherwise-boring world of inheritance laws. There are even more complex situations, like what happens when a studio wants to digitally recreate someone, but there’s no family left to answer to it? That’s a question that’s unfortunately already being asked.
It’s Already Starting to Happen
The scariest part about this is that we’re approaching a tipping point. No longer is the industry on the verge of CGI resurrections, as movies are already attempting this. The first and biggest example of such was inRogue One: A Star Wars Storyback in 2016. Actor Peter Cushing had sadly passed away in 1994 and thus was unable to appear in the movie. The filmmakers had two choices: either explain why his character, Tarkin, wouldn’t be present or bring him back with CGI. They chose the latter, and that decision marked a shift in the industry.
Thankfully, his family’s estate signed off on what was happening, and the filmmakers went about it in the most respectful way. A body double stood in, and his face was digitally replaced with Cushing’s. Unfortunately, it wasn’t received too highly due to the uncanny valley appearance, as the technology wasn’t 100% there yet. TheHuffington Postat the time even went as far as to say it was “a giant breach of respect for the dead”. The slippery slope of actors being brought back with CGI was one that the industry had just began it’s decent upon.
Related:12 Movies That Overused CGI (And Suffered for It)
With every process likeRogue Onepromising it was a one-and-done experience to service the story, there is an example like 2023’sThe Flash. Very infamously,The Flashhas a sequence towards the end of the film with glimpses into different universes as the timelines collapse, full of cameos and a few dead actors fully recreated with CGI. This is where the entire situation gets tricky and unethical. In the case of Christopher Reeve’s Superman, who was brought back,his family allegedly signed off on it, though that information has not been confirmed. Reeve was fully recreated using CGI, and the final result came out looking unfinished, which only added to the controversy.
When it comes to George Reeves, one of the first actors to play Superman in live action, it represents the biggest problems with this issue. Reeves had anincredibly tragic deathand one that shook the entire industry. Reeves also famously resented playing the character of Superman, which makes the decision to bring him back with CGI all the more disrespectful. On top of that, he, unfortunately, left no family behind, so there was nobody to get the approval of to make this happen. The entire situation here brings out the worst in the issue of CGI resurrections and shows why people are so against it. It’s cheap nostalgia at the sake of the people they’re bringing back, doing a disservice to their memory whether they wanted it or not.
Actors Are Striking Over This
At the time of writing this, the Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) has beenon strike since June 13, 2025. One of the biggest reasons that they’re striking is because the studios want to own their likenesses.According to Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the Chief Negotiator of SAG-AFTRA, the studios want to scan actors and “own that scan, their image, their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity on any project they want, with no consent and no compensation.”
With studios being able to do that, this means that actors could be brought back from the dead for the rest of time and never see a dime from it. It’s a very scary premise that would thrust the entire industry away fromhuman performances and into CGI and AI recreations"acting". Actors clearly don’t want anything to do with it, no matter how hard big studios push for more CGI recreations.
Bringing actors back from the dead is always going to be a controversial subject, especially with how many unethical ways it can be used. It has to be in the safest hands to be even remotely used right, and on top of that, they need to give VFX artists enough time to do the actor justice. The CGI resurrection of Hollywood stars hits squarely on the sorts of complex philosophical questions on death and individual rights in the face of emerging technologies that humans of the twenty-first century will increasingly be forced to answer.
