Eternal Celebrities: The Multi-Billion Opportunity Coming
A shift in law means agents and managers must now act as estate planners as an endless career is within reach (if society can get over the ick factor)
Erik Barmack writes every other Tue. for paid subscribers. He recently wrote about OpenAI’s Ghiblification moment as a wake-up call for Hollywood; how AI fan fiction is entertainment’s next cash cow; and an AI animation app that should terrify studios.
Suzanne Somers’ appeal spans generations — from American Graffiti to her sitcoms Three’s Company, She’s the Sheriff and Step by Step to her prescient, proto-influencer role as a celebrity entrepreneur hawking the ThighMaster. She passed away in 2023 at the age of 76.
But in our AI Age, why let a little thing like dying get in the way of your career?
Late last month, Hollo, a conversational AI company, and Realbotix, which makes customizable humanoid robots, unveiled a version of the late actress. This synthetic twin is designed to mimic Somers’ voice, personality and facial expressions. It’s loaded with a database of her performances. Alan Hamel, her widower and partner in buying and popularizing ThighMaster, claimed that they discussed this kind of idea before her death.
Suzanne AI, though, isn’t just a private memorial. Hamel hopes it can appear in future projects, including new episodes of Three’s Company. In other words, Somers isn’t just being remembered — she’s being reactivated.
Do you find this a bit odd? Possibly revolting even? Well, it could be the future.
The Somers humanoid is both a pivot point and a great leap forward for celebrities and their after-death commercial opportunities. Unlike holograms or disembodied AI voice clones, this is an AI that talks back, that could confer with its team and insist on certain deal points in contracts on behalf of a personality who is no longer on our mortal coil. It could ask for Evian water before heading into certain meetings, though I am unsure of the robot’s water resistance.
This is both touching and troubling, legacy management infused with technological ambition. There are implications not only for stars but agents and managers, studios and audiences.
In this issue, I’ll tell you:
The legal change that inadvertently opened up possibilities for AI versions of dead celebrities
How the famous can now control how they live on
Why agents and managers could end up in charge of creating recurring revenue streams for estates — and themselves
The potential impact on reboots, original projects and working actors
What studios will love about working with AI talent
Where Big Tech fits into the ecosystem
How fans have reacted to revivified stars
Hollywood Forever: AI Rights Go Infinite
On Jan. 1, California’s A.B. 1836 officially became law. Quietly and without much fanfare, it transformed the future of fame.
For the first time, the state’s post-mortem rights statute was explicitly expanded to include AI-generated digital replicas of deceased personalities. This means not just the name, voice, or image of a celebrity is protected — but their entire synthetic being.
The law was largely designed to curb the proliferation of unauthorized deepfakes: scammy ads, fraudulent endorsements and sketchy AI-generated content that turned the faces of the dead into digital billboards, such as the imagined Marilyn Monroe Chanel No. 5 ad above. (My colleague Ashley Cullins wrote about the effort to put a stop to these AI-powered scams last August.)
But in attempting to protect the dead from exploitation, the law may now also empower estates, studios and AI firms to push these likenesses even further than the public — or the celebrities themselves — ever intended. It’s a paradox: safeguarding identity while simultaneously making it more valuable, and more usable, than ever.
Forbes’ most recent list of the 13 highest-earning dead celebrities has them earning a collective $1.2 billion in the 12 months ending Sept. 2024. Half of that revenue is from Michael Jackson, thanks to the touring musical of his songs; the only actor on the list is Matthew Perry, because of his Friends residuals.
For anyone managing the legacy of a famous figure, this law represents a monumental shift. And for everyone else, it should be a wake-up call.
Rebel Without a Soul: Inevitable Backlash & the Future
While Suzanne Somers’ AI twin may be among the first interactive posthumous performers, it’s hardly the first digital resurrection.
Long after James Dean wore that glistening red nylon jacket and smoked cigarettes with such great indifference, long after he stopped driving his 1949 Mercury Coupe, he was cast in yet another movie. Finding Jack, a Vietnam War film, was slated for production in 2019.
His likeness, which was to be recreated using CGI and AI, was selected for a leading role, despite Dean never having read the script, auditioned — or existing in the era the film depicts.
The backlash from actors and filmmakers was immediate and vituperative. SAG-AFTRA decried the decision. Chris Evans tweeted, “This is awful . . . the complete lack of understanding here is shameful.” Elijah Wood simply replied, “NOPE.” The project stalled, mired in criticism and legal complexities.
But something keeps bothering me about this otherwise flash-of-outrage-type story, and it’s this: The producers, Magic City, had a legal right to make this film. It had cleared Dean’s life rights with his estate. So the only things stopping Finding Jack from being made — and bringing Dean back to life on film — were the limitations of the technology and the moral outrage of the community required to sell the film.
Every technological advance of the last several decades eventually gets applied to a deceased celebrity — and then faces a moral panic. In 1997, certain priggish viewers were outraged when Fred Astaire, who had died 10 years earlier, appeared in a Dirt Devil commercial dancing with a vacuum cleaner. This ad, engineered with then-cutting-edge visual effects to replace the mop he danced with in Easter Parade and the coat rack he squired around in Royal Wedding, was condemned by some to be grotesque, ghoulish and exploitative, including Astaire’s daughter Ava. (His widow Robyn approved the deal.)
The unease wasn’t just because of the vacuum (though it didn’t help!): It was the unsettling sense that something sacred had been crossed.
Yet we keep trampling that line, whether it’s posthumous hologram tours starring Whitney Houston, Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly from a company called BASE Hologram or the controversy my colleague Manori Ravindran covered last year of beloved British TV talk show host Michael Parkinson being revived via AI to do an interview podcast with living celebrities.
Even in a world accustomed to voice assistants and AI narrators, we find new ways to push it and spark controversy. But as our sense of AI likenesses becomes pervasive and the tech gets better (as I wrote just two weeks ago, we’re now seeing breakthroughs in AI’s ability to maintain character consistency across its output), how long until the next Finding Jack gets made?
The stars themselves may have a say in that answer. Before the rise of generative AI, Robin Williams realized that “life rights” could extend . . . well, beyond his death.
In 2014, he reportedly included a clause in his will preventing any posthumous use of his image, voice, or likeness for 25 years after his death. “Robin Williams wanted to make sure that his image isn’t tarnished,” the privacy attorney Rachel Alexander told The Guardian in 2015, “with unauthorized images used in adverts for example or films, which technology has now made possible. I think it is very likely we will see more people doing it.”
Agents and Managers: A Long-Term Opportunity
For talent agents and managers, they may no longer be able to afford to think of their jobs in terms of short-term negotiations or even career-building. Representation, in other words, doesn’t stop when the heart does. It just changes jurisdiction. Why give up millions in fees to a licensing firm which handles deceased celebrities? Especially as AI expands the pool of potential afterlife clients beyond a handful of iconic, gone-too-soon stars.
Reps may become, by necessity, estate planners, structuring contracts with clauses that account for a client’s digital afterlife. Managers will have to understand posthumous licensing, IP rights and AI voice clones.
That brings up a darker labor question: If AI can extend the working life of a celebrity long after death — what happens to the living actors who would otherwise fill that role? Somers’ widower imagines her AI humanoid starring in a Three’s Company reboot; would it really be without Somers’ original co-stars?
The risk then is that projects like these don’t just resurrect the dead but crowd out the living.
This isn’t purely theoretical; it could be contractual. If deceased actors keep their roles indefinitely through AI, the already-limited number of opportunities for working actors shrinks further. The nostalgia economy could cannibalize another piece of Hollywood.
Conversely, and more optimistically, if shows like Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie can hit the streaming charts decades after they went off the air, maybe, instead of rebooting them with unknown casts, we continue them with AI-extended versions of beloved characters. Maybe that’s what fans want anyway. That approach would allow human actors to pursue original work rather than endless remake cycles, and it would create recurring revenue streams for agencies.
Studios: IP as Legacy — and Currency
If you’re at a studio, this presents the opportunity to recreate a version of the 1930s production system where it could control the actors, the IP, and the best way to make films and how they’re distributed. Season-over-season pay bumps may be contained by the studio because one way in which a hot actor has leverage is they can point to other offers or their crowded schedule — or engage in bad behavior (not show up to work).
The AI version of James Dean is never drunk on set, never a target of a sexual harassment claim and can work whenever the studio wants. If you’re, say, WBD CEO David Zaslav, that’s powerfully appealing.
The big AI players will likely win, too. Bringing back the dead realistically will require a lot of training on an actor’s style. A closed system may be able to train on James Dean films. But what if you want Dean in Rome during WWII? Scale and scope matter. Companies such as OpenAI and Google already have a lot of training data, and more data will open up more possibilities for AI stars to do more than just repeat their catchphrases.
At the heart of all these examples is a new understanding of celebrity: not as a person, but as a portfolio. Suzanne Somers, James Dean and Whitney Houston may no longer be alive, but their names, voices and facial data live on in licensing agreements, neural networks and brand strategies.
This transformation has created a new kind of entertainment math. Familiarity sells. Nostalgia drives engagement. AI enables scale.
If you combine a beloved icon with generative media and global distribution, you don’t just get a tribute — you get a business model, potentially an incredibly profitable one.
Fans: The Last Hurdle
But the public has to accept the AI celebrity or it’s worth nothing. Our discomfort often seems less about the technology and more about the intimacy of the interaction, whether it feels exploitative, excessive or just emotionally uncanny.
This moment feels different not only because the tech is better, but also the stakes have changed, as has the law.
So have the gatekeepers. Every living celebrity now knows what’s possible and can decide for themselves what to do. Yet even then, a contract can’t anticipate every possible scenario. We have to ask: Who gives consent? Can AI ever respect legacy the way a person would?
I don’t ever expect to see Suzanne AI acting ditzy for laughs in a Three’s Company reboot, but the resurrection economy will only grow. Some revivals will be tasteful. Some won’t. But all of them will remind us what we’ve lost — and what we’re willing to recreate.
Maybe the real question isn’t whether we can bring the dead back to life. It’s whether, in doing so, how much of our humanity is sloughed off along the way.
Erik Barmack is a working producer and the founder of Wild Sheep Content. He also runs a news site dedicated to AI in the entertainment industry called AI in Hollywood.
