Most people haven’t even noticed, but the entertainment industry is trying to do something pretty evil.
The start seems to have been in the Star Wars movie subtitled Rogue One.
The creators decided to bring back a very minor character from the original movie who had been played by the 63-year-old Peter Cushing back in 1976. They wanted the character to be the same age as he had been in the earlier move.
This was going to be difficult, as 40 real-world years had passed. How were they going to make a 103 year-old man look like he was 63? The good news for the studio is that at that point Cushing had been dead for over 20 years.
The put him into the movie by recreating him with computers. They got the actor’s heirs on board, and it worked pretty well on-screen.
In that same film, they used cgi technology to bend old footage of Carrie Fisher into a few scenes. They needed her to also be 20 years younger than her real age. She was fine with it.
Shortly after, Carrie Fisher died.
That didn’t stop her from appearing as a major character in the final Star Wars movie.
They decided to blunt any possible criticism by pretty much using already filmed clips gleaned from all of her recent Star Wars work, and to bend the story to fit what they had. They claimed they didn’t cgi her at all, but that’s merely a matter of semantics.
They cut her out, slid other actors in, and warped things all over the place.
Most fans didn’t mind at all. I did, as it was all (A creepy) and (B very dangerous for the future).
Let’s say some studio decides to make say, a Western. They want it to be exciting and novel and news-grabbing. Who do they hire for the lead? Will it be a relatively unknown actor, or perhaps a high-priced star?
Maybe they will go with John Wayne. He died over 40 years ago, but there would be no lack of material to produce a fine cgi clone from.
How owns his likeness, anyhow? Do his heirs, and if so, how long does it take for that to expire? Could they buy the rights to his image? Maybe, the courts would decide that the companies that own the rights to his movies also have the rights to any computer doppelgänger created from them.
And how about new actors? Will their contracts all contain clauses that specifically give all rights to clones to the studios? Of course they will. They probably already do.
Again, there will be a creepy factor. If studios had such capabilities and powers all along, we might still be watching new episodes of “Leave it to Beaver,” with the kid forever young.
“Big Bang Theory,” would never have gone off the air, and the studios would never have been paying the core stars a million bucks an episode.
Cgi actors might be expensive to build, but they never need paying, or want creative control.
Have an actor who baulks at doing a nude scene? No problem. Have an actor who turns down an offer to do a bad movie? No problem?
The studios will literally own them.
There is already talk of using cgi to put James Dean into some war movie. He’s been dead for 64 years. He was also a pacifist.
Think it isn’t a problem, or so difficult and expensive that it won’t be much of an issue take a look at this clip. For fun, somebody used a technique called, “deep fake,” a clip off of a talkshow, and a bunch of images of a well known actor, and banged this off.
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