Hollywood’s last signs of life came earlier this year, with the masterly first half of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. Not satisfied with its stunning depiction of the rural African American South, the film turned itself into a routine vampire flick, driving a stake through the heart of the ailing movie business. The Wicked franchise’s spell proved unable to revive the patient. One Battle After Another, intended like the recent Killers of the Flower Moon as an auteurist booster shot, showed merely that a once-great director could fashion a bloated, cringeworthy wokeist epic.
When seen through the rearview mirror, there’s something grotesquely ironic—and maybe appropriate—about how Hollywood embraced specifically anti-Jewish politics in this era. In September 2025, a petition circulated by Film Workers for Palestine garnered 5,000 signatures from directors, actors, and studio employees. The petition called for a boycott of Israeli artists and companies, essentially a new blacklist which, like the old one, targeted Jews. The Jews were the citadels of Hollywood’s old priorities; once it couldn’t live up to those anymore, the best way to burn it all down was to betray the very people who built it in the first place.
The seductive power of classic Hollywood can still be experienced, if you can find a theater that shows 35 mm or 70 mm prints. The colors still gleam, the black-and-white shadows still beckon, and the faces of the deities called stars still loom in the darkness. The monumental directors, actors, and filmworkers, nearly all of them now dead, will shine forever. It was the pictures that got small.
We think that just because a creative industry was around for our entire lives, it will be around forever. But Renaissance painting was once a creative industry—it had artists and assistants and patrons and audiences, a whole functioning creative economy. It doesn’t exist anymore. We still have the paintings, just as we’ll still have Citizen Kane and Vertigo and Goodfellas, but the life-world that made them—and that could ever make anything else like them again—is gone.
As someone who truly loves movies, it feels genuinely sad to see an industry DEI such a painful death:
If this isn’t the death knell, it means that a very different industry is emerging: Forget Tilly Norwood … Here Comes A.I. Val Kilmer.
Director Coerte Voorhees, with the approval of several members of Kilmer’s family, will use generative A.I. to insert the star’s likeness and voice. His character, a Native American spiritualist, will be seen at various stages of his life.
That’s no problem for A.I., which can use the endless array of images and video of the star to capture him at various ages.
This won’t be a glorified cameo, like the late Peter Cushing appearing in “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” The role is considered a significant part of the film, a project co-starring Wes Studi, Tom Felton and Abigail Lawrie.
Speculation over this kind of digital stunt casting isn’t new. Modern stars must wonder how their likenesses might be used in projects after their passing.
That reality is here, but will it actually grace theaters? Could an uprising over the digital casting force the film’s creators to reconsider?
Back in the 1980s, Arthur C. Clarke predicted 21st century digital recreations of the stars of Hollywood’s golden age such as Bogie and John Wayne. But how will audiences react to an AI recreation of a man who passed away quite recently?
