Last week, in-theater photos and videos from the climax of The Flash, one of the last vestiges of the DCEU, leaked. The plot of the film is mostly convoluted superhero nonsense but, in essence, the scene in question involves multiple versions of the speedy hero watching awestruck as their actions start causing the different worlds of the DC multiverse to clash and collapse into each other.
We are treated to displays of the recognizable faces that inhabit these worlds—specifically, digital recreations of classic portrayals of Superman, Supergirl and Batman designed to get a pop from the audience, featuring the visages of both living and deceased actors. You’ve got Christopher Reeve, Helen Slater, George Reeves, Adam West and even a Nicolas Cage Superman who has only ever existed as a hypothetical version of the character in a never-made Tim Burton movie. All are rendered as uncanny, dead-staring, artificial voids of humanity, existing only as crushing reminders of the hold that the intersection of capitalism, technology and fanboy pandering has on us as a culture.
Of course, everyone online got mad…that the new superhero movie was being spoiled. To be fair, through gritted teeth, I avoided any quote-tweet bashing of the leaks because I empathize with the modern dilemma of not being able to log onto social media without having a movie you want to see being ruined. I know that there are people (many, in fact) out there who enjoy these movies more than me; I’m not here to wrestle with the social politics of spoiler culture. That said, the reaction to these particular leaks made me question where we draw the line between being rightfully peeved about a callous disregard for other people’s experience and righteously exposing yet another craven instance of virtual grave-robbing for the sake of catering to a vacuous culture of multiverses, used only to further monetize a cultural familiarity with existing IP. That’s what this scene represents, and it’s extraordinarily grotesque and depressing.
This practice of digitally recreating actors is not a newfound phenomenon of course. We saw it in 1978, when Bruce Lee was inserted into Game of Death after he died during the early stages of production. Similar incidents have been seen numerous times since then: Paul Walker was famously, posthumously inserted into scenes in Furious 7 to finish the picture, including a closing epilogue created to give him a cinematic goodbye. These examples, of actors’ likenesses being used after passing away mid-production, are generally a less grievous example of the topic at hand. These performers were already involved with a production that, in a lot of cases, was very close to being finished—but they still implicitly perpetuate the normalization of digital actors within the larger cultural zeitgeist.
Then, of course, there are the digital replications of living actors who agreed to participate. Star Wars is the most obvious culprit of this, with Mark Hamill agreeing to have the likeness of his young self appear in The Mandalorian. Carrie Fisher was still alive to give her consent in making an appearance in Rogue One, though she apparently did not realize it was going to be computer generated. Both appear as their younger selves in Rise of Skywalker, with Fisher’s appearance being approved and played by her daughter Billie Lourd. As for the third in the main trio, Harrison Ford, he’ll be de-aged in the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Though portrayals that have the personal blessing or full-blown participation of the subject attached to them may free the filmmakers of ethical wrongdoing when it comes to the act of digital impersonation, it does not let them off the hook from the ways these creations still reinforce this practice as something routine.
Besides that, these recreations exist only as exceedingly weird, eerie imitations of their flesh-and-blood counterparts. One of the few instances of de-aging that worked was in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, where the unnatural look that the tech produces adds a spectral layer to the story structure of an old man looking back on a regretful life. In nearly every other case, its use adds nothing to the texture of the story, which accentuates its bizarreness. You cannot tell me that this thing actually passes as a real person:
That lifeless piece of computer engineering masquerading under the guise of human skin is what these companies are also inflicting on dead actors, who don’t have a say in the matter. Star Wars is a culprit of this as well: Peter Cushing died in 1994 but was resurrected to once again portray Grand Moff Tarkin for Rogue One. Obviously, Cushing was not involved in the production of a film that was made in 2015 and his appearance is intrinsically suspect. But his character was deemed crucial to the plot and, indeed, it would seem strange to have a movie about a group of rebels invading the Death Star in a New Hope prequel and not include the ship’s commander. Is there some kind of overarching stipulation that if you have a good story reason to reanimate a dead actor you’re within your rights to do so? I would argue not really, and that everyone would have been just fine if the character had been recast. VFX supervisor John Knoll insisted that the production “didn’t do anything Peter Cushing would have objected to,” and were working in cooperation with his estate, which means they’re free and clear, right? No! It takes a big, presumptuous leap to assume any dead actor would have wanted to be represented in this way at all, and I think we all know the estates of artists are not always the most principled.
For example, Christopher Reeve once stated in an interview that he would never appear as Superman purely for the paycheck, and that “when you start working for money you turn a corner. It’s a violation, really.” His estate must not have shared the same ethos that “one of the few things you have to hang onto is your integrity about your work,” as his memory is now being used to turn a profit.
Which leads us back to The Flash, the latest in an ever-increasing lineup of movies featuring synthetic actors (alongside other offenders like 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife which featured a CG interpretation of Harold Ramis). The sequence in question is almost comical in its unflinching indifference to even the basic tenets of good taste. It’s a scene that comes out of nowhere and has no real bearing on the rest of the film. Ostensibly, our protagonists are causing some indistinct idea of the multiverse to be destroyed, but it’s a superfluous layer added onto a climax that already had a sufficient amount of stakes, attached just to throw these falsified cameos into a film whose thesis ironically seems to be about letting go of the past.
It is a carousel of crudity: The score lifts up while the camera pans across from one universe to the next with a self-aggrandizing sense of importance. The characters mostly don’t even do anything. They casually glide into the frame just to look at the audience, with obvious beats left between them to make room for applause. It’s a contemptible tactic that goes to unconscionable means to capitalize on nostalgia, all while displaying a completely ghoulish interpretation of what is supposed to be the film’s big, epic finale. It’s so morally bankrupt it’s a wonder they didn’t throw in Heath Ledger’s Joker.
These CGI creations are not only poorly rendered, further amplifying the macabre aberration that is their PS3 game existence, but grossly utilized to satisfy unrealized fan desires. Reeve and Slater never shared the screen together; in fact, Reeve flatly turned down a cameo in the Supergirl movie. But now, with computer magic, we can manipulate their likenesses into doing whatever we want! The aforementioned Nic Cage Superman movie that never happened? We can throw together a shoddy cutscene so that the most in-the-know obsessives can look on in awe.
It contributes to a feedback loop that favors those viewers that have an alarming amount of their personality wrapped up in this capitalistic cultural cache. The more Easter eggs you recognize, the more you’re rewarded by the studio, and the more the studio is rewarded by the fans that beg for more. It’s a prospect with a limited ceiling—these things are going to have to become more self-contained eventually—but these studios can’t back off now: Their core fanbase would be disappointed by a lack of connections to other films and properties.
Are all actors that enter into a franchise now signing up to be pawns, agreeing to be resurrected at the whim of some executive suits? Did George Reeves die of a gunshot wound, just to be used to bump the shares of Warner Brothers over 60 years later? Did Christopher Reeve spend his final years learning to live life in a wheelchair, just to be digitally exhumed and “fixed” as an able-bodied ghost, so the shittiest proponents of nerd culture can clap at the version of him that lives in their memory?
The CG cameos are easy to write off as inconsequential asides in what is ultimately just another superhero movie, and one with a particularly controversial star in Ezra Miller. But this all stems from the same destructive mindset that values AI-penned scripts or those AI-generated Wes Anderson videos: They are barren facsimiles of artistic expression. They lack humanity, which renders them worthless simulacra made to sell you a product. There is no joy or pain or love or fear expressed by such a duplication. They are fraudulent, exploiting emotions so they become a transaction. These are not just movie moments to be spoiled—they are active hostilities to film culture, and the anger being directed toward “spoilers” instead of the actual contents of the film is confounding. It shows that the future these people want for us is already here, staring us blankly in the face.
Trace Sauveur is a writer based in Austin, TX, where he primarily contributes to The Austin Chronicle. He loves David Lynch, John Carpenter, the Fast & Furious movies, and all the same bands he listened to in high school. He is @tracesauveur on Twitter where you can allow his thoughts to contaminate your feed.