Nostalgia Isn’t Enough To Save Hollywood. But AI Might Be

The Bad Guys 2

M3GAN 2.0

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues

This is just a few of the many sequels in theaters now. There’s more. It’s fair to say Hollywood’s recent playbook is to keep pumping them out.

Hollywood Now Runs on Nostalgia Fumes

“Just last year, nearly every month a studio was releasing either a prequel, sequel, remake, reboot or my personal favorite, the soft reboot,” explains Justin Hood for FSU News. It’s to the point, he explains, that Disney is cannibalizing its animated fare just to put something familiar onscreen. “What’s next? Are Shrek and Madagascar getting live-action remakes, too? Let us just hope some hack screenwriter isn’t getting any ideas from this article.”

With so much derivative fare, it may seem the entertainment industry has run out of ideas. Few truly believe that. The truth is nostalgia sells. With the average film costing between $100 and $150 million to produce, studios are reluctant to take chances on new ideas when they can mine the past for proven intellectual property.

Except there’s even a problem with that strategy.

The Entertainment Industry is struggling to source more franchise material from its ever-dwindling I.P. quarry. “But after mining the most iconic franchises, studios are now scraping the bottom of the intellectual property barrel,” writes Collider. “The next wave of legacy sequels is bringing back not icons, but characters from modest hits like Practical Magic, The Devil Wears Prada, and Meet the Parents. These films might have their fans, but they don’t have the long-term cultural hold of larger properties.”

Enter Artificial Intelligence

Fortunately, AI can help.

And not just because it now has the power of Silicon Valley in its back pocket. (Consider the arrival of Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated character attracting interest from talent agencies and roiling real Hollywood stars.)

No, the power I’m speaking of is resurrecting the dead to infuse life into a flatlining entertainment industry. To understand how, let’s revisit what I recently wrote for Forbes about digital mind clones. Based on large language model (LLM) tech, it’s possible to produce replicas of people’s cognitive styles and personalities. This is especially helpful from an advisory standpoint. Imagine filling your company’s board with deceased luminaries such as Steve Jobs, Estee Lauder, Ray Kroc, and Sam Walton.

Helpful as that is, LLM tech can also serve another business purpose: breathing new vibrancy into movies. Sora 2 shows us how. By now you’ve likely seen deepfake videos featuring unlikely celebrity mashups. One presents the late singer Amy Winehouse preparing ceviche alongside rapper Tupac Shakur and Queen Elizabeth II. (There are even versions with them speaking in Spanish, further demonstrating AI’s versatility.)

Bring Back the Stars We Love

Amusing as these videos are, they reveal something more profound: a possible play to boost box office sales: restore beloved golden age Hollywood stars to the Silver Screen. Why settle for reheated mid-tier content like The Devil Wears Prada or Meet the Parents when you could greenlight a film starring an AI-revived Humphrey Bogart alongside Timothée Chalamet?

In fact, why not drop Bogie in for a cameo on Dune: Part Three scheduled for release in December 2026? His surprising appearance alone could massively elevate ticket sales. This is especially true if you dropped in a few other deceased starlets he once played alongside for good measure, including Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Katherine Hepburn and Mary Astor.

As Sora 2 shows, it’s quite possible to technically pull off this feat. Actually, the biggest challenge will likely involve rights, specifically determining if studios and/or streaming platforms possess the legal wherewithal to cast deceased actors into movies they never agreed to appear in when alive.

Digital Resurrection’s Legal Difficulties

The issue drew global attention in 2019 when producers announced that James Dean, who died in 1955, would star in the Vietnam-era drama Finding Jack. According to the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Media Engagement, “Magic City Films obtained the rights to Dean’s image from Dean’s estate and CMG Worldwide—the intellectual property management company that has represented Dean’s family for 38 years. Magic City Films partnered with Canadian VFX banner Imagine Engine and South African VFX company MOI Worldwide to re-create Dean using footage/photos to construct a ‘full body’ CGI’ performance with another actor’s voice.”

Though that film still hasn’t officially released, the legality involving it has only become more pressing in recent years due to AI. As International Documentary Association describes the issue, “In general, whether a deceased person’s estate has a post-mortem right of publicity—essentially a right to profit from and control commercial use of the deceased’s name, voice, signature, photograph or likeness—is primarily a question of state law. Twenty-four states—including California, New York, Florida, Hawaii, Nevada and Texas—recognize a post-mortem right of publicity under state common law or statute.” According to the IDA, such laws do permit “transferable property rights” to one’s deceased heirs and/or presumably studios that may own such rights, enabling them to be used for continuing commercial ends.

The New Creative Frontier

Setting aside such legal considerations, Dune 3 starring Bogart et al, barely hints at the creative possibilities LLMs offer Hollywood to right its content ship. Only a few decades ago, marquee names like Leonardo DiCaprio, Julie Roberts, Tom Hanks and Robert Redford drew fans to the theaters in droves to see their next screen gem. Even if some actors are past their prime, Hollywood need not count them out. Once more, stars could brought back to the screen to play alongside each other at any desired age or even to appear with deceased actors from previous generations.

Purists may balk at the idea of a younger Matt Damon in a new Bourne Identity facing off against Clark Gable as a formidable villain, yet Hollywood is already saturated with sequels. Why not try something really novel? In that case, it might not be a bad idea to cast Marilyn Monroe as Bourne’s new love interest.

Of course, renewed movie magic brought to us by AI needn’t stop with recasting beloved stars from bygone eras. Again, nostalgia is Hollywood’s current revenue model. Thanks to newfangled tools like Sora 2 and Veo 3, it’s increasingly possible to perform more creative feats, including reimagining sets and time periods. Why not recreate Die Hard—only this time set the whole thing in space with John McClane dueling Hans Gruber on the International Space Station? How about remaking Laurence of Arabia with a whole new cast of classic actors, only this time shot in 1940s black-and-white noir? Not only that, but you could flip the point of view this time around, reimagining the story via the eyes of the Bedouin tribes.

But why stop there? You could even create a Director’s Cut DVD and/or Blue Ray edition in which you posthumously interview the real T.E. Lawrence, again using LLMs based on his original writings to get his take on the moral conflicts of colonialism. Clearly, the options are endless when we apply new tools to old problems. Though these ideas may rankle legacy sensibilities, they hint at what’s possible when we open our minds to more avenues of creativity. They also suggest another Hollywood Golden Age may be around the corner.

Only this one will look very different from everything that came before it.