{"id":392587,"date":"2026-03-19T04:09:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-19T04:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/392587\/"},"modified":"2026-03-19T04:09:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T04:09:07","slug":"val-kilmer-to-be-ai-ed-into-movie-with-blessing-of-his-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/392587\/","title":{"rendered":"Val Kilmer to Be AI-ed Into Movie with Blessing of His Family"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to Variety<\/a>, photorealistic moving images ostensibly of the late, great movie star Val Kilmer are going to be used to make it seem as if he is starring in an upcoming movie about a Native American Catholic priest with tuberculosis called As Deep as the Grave.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Per Variety:<\/p>\n

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\u201cEven though he didn\u2019t shoot a single scene, [director\u00a0Coerte] Voorhees has been able to realize his vision of having Kilmer in the ensemble by using state-of-the-art generative AI. And he\u2019s done it with the cooperation of the late actor\u2019s estate and his daughter Mercedes (Voorhees says Kilmer\u2019s son Jack is also supportive).\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cDespite the fact some people might call it controversial, this is what Val wanted,\u201d Vorhees claimed to Variety. Before his death, the ailing Kilmer had been cast in As Deep as the Grave, and Vorhees claims it he felt it was an \u201cimportant story that he wanted his name on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Variety notes that Sonantic<\/a> worked with Kilmer on a facsimile of his voice when his vocal cords were damaged by a medical procedure, but it\u2019s not clear what piece of video-generating tech Vorhees plans to use to essentially deepfake Kilmer into his movie. However, depending on what Vorhees\u2019 standards are, that question might be purely academic at this point. Variety says he has many images of Kilmer \u201cprovided by his family,\u201d along with \u201cfootage from his final years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since he has photos he\u2019s legally allowed to put into an AI still image generator, even a small movie budget should provide Vorhees with enough tokens to churn those into splashy text-to-video outputs featuring Val Kilmer via a video generating tool along the lines of Kling 3.0<\/a>. Workarounds for consumer AI applications already enable influencers to make fairly convincing deepfake videos of celebrities<\/a> that social media sites like Instagram seem to tolerate as long as they\u2019re labeled as AI-generated.<\/p>\n

But whether or not such a workflow can generate something that would satisfy a paying movie audience expecting the digital resurrection of Val Kilmer remains to be seen.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s doubtful we\u2019ll get certainty about whether or not Kilmer really would have thought this was okay. But it\u2019s been documented that he thought so highly of the profession of acting that he believed actors understand the experiences they act out at a deeper level than people who experience them in real life. He said this point blank in a 2005 interview<\/a>, going as far as to say that if Jude Law had acted in a movie about young Val Kilmer, Jude Law would know more about what it feels like to be Val Kilmer than Val Kilmer.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s certainly an unconventional belief, but Kilmer was a guy with a lot of unconventional beliefs<\/a>, and this one could easily be construed as a sign that he of all people would have preferred that someone like Jude Law be hired to act in As Deep as the Grave, but, once again, we\u2019ll probably never know.<\/p>\n