Val Kilmer and Immortal IP Stars: Private Equity’s Next Play
Hollywood’s answer to the music catalog boom may be here
I cover Hollywood and AI. I wrote about Ben Affleck selling his AI company to Netflix, the enertainment industry’s meltdown over ByteDance’s Seedance, and how Hollywood choked the rise of OpenAI video model Sora.
There was always something spectral about Val Kilmer’s late career — the altered, gravelly voice after throat cancer, the physical limitations, the sense that the performance was being assembled from fragments of a once-commanding screen presence. Which is why the news that Kilmer will appear in a new film after his death doesn’t feel like a rupture so much as a continuation, albeit one that formalizes something Hollywood has been inching toward for years.
The film, As Deep as the Grave (formerly Canyon del Muerto), is an independent period drama about archaeologists Ann and Earl Morris and their excavation work in the American Southwest. Kilmer had been cast as Father Fintan, a priest tied to Native American spirituality, but never filmed his scenes due to health issues and production delays. Rather than recast the role, the filmmakers, with the cooperation of his estate and family, opted to construct the performance using generative AI models trained on archival footage, photographs and voice replication technology. Writer-director Coerte Voorhees has said he built the role specifically for Kilmer, and now Kilmer is being rebuilt for the film, which is produced by Voorhees and his brother and is seeking a distributor. That inversion represents something new: the separation of performance from the physical presence of the performer.
Hollywood has flirted with this idea before, most notably with the widely criticized attempt to cast James Dean in a Vietnam War drama called Finding Jack, announced in 2019 but never finished. That project had estate approval and a clear technological roadmap, but it collapsed under backlash from actors, discomfort from audiences and — more important — financing and distribution hesitation. The industry treated it as a line that shouldn’t be crossed. In retrospect, it looks more like a line that couldn’t yet be monetized. The tools weren’t ready, and the audience hadn’t been conditioned.
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Now both conditions have changed. Digital doubles, de-aging and AI-assisted voice work are are standard practice. The line between captured and constructed performance has blurred to the point of irrelevance.
And once that line disappears, the underlying economics shift with it as a new business model is about to hit the industry.
Below, I break down:
How Kilmer’s posthumous role turns actors into IP — and what that business model looks like
Why an actor like Tom Cruise could become a multi billion-dollar annuity
The financial math that will bring in private equity and sovereign wealth funds
Why the music catalog boom is the blueprint — and why studios may be left out
What Hollywood can learn from Prince, Michael Jackson and The Beatles — but why its upside is even bigger
Why franchises built on bankable stars may never have to end