Since the invention and popularity of CGI technology in movies, altering human faces and bodies has always been something desired by and done by studios for a variety of reasons. As the technology advanced, special effects teams were able to make more and more accurate recreations of real people through CGI.
These advancements became important in the public eye when the 2016 movie Rogue One was released. At the end of this film, special effects teams were able to recreate the face of the recently deceased actress Carrie Fisher and paste it onto a stand in. In the same movie, they were able to do the same with the actor Peter Cushing who had been dead more than twenty years at the time of the movie’s release.
This all brought up the question of if reviving dead actors through CGI was morally okay, especially since none of the families of these actors were receiving money from these performances.
In more recent movies like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, studios were able to de-age actors to portray younger versions of themselves. This brought the issue even further with people now questioning if it’s right to recreate actors that are still living.
With the current actors and CGI workers’ strike trying to solve these issues for the people suffering from them, the problem may be resolved soon.
With so many movies going the route of CGI to portray characters created by now dead actors, I believe recasting would save everyone time and money. Recasting brings old characters into new generations and leads to new takes on pre-existing characters. This has proven to work in prequel stories like Solo, the Hobbit films and Hannibal.
The writers strike has recently concluded with the writers getting most of their demands which gives hope for the actors and special effects workers to do the same.
