The trailer debuted Wednesday at CinemaCon in Las Vegas. A dead man’s face, reconstructed by algorithms, delivering lines he never recorded for a film he never shot. “Don’t fear the dead and don’t fear me,” says Kilmer’s AI-rendered Father Fintan, a Catholic priest and Native American spiritualist, in the closing moments of the preview for “As Deep as the Grave.”

Kilmer died last April at 65 from pneumonia. He had been cast in the historical drama years before his death — the role was written around him, drawing on his Native American heritage and his love of the American Southwest — but he never made it to set. Throat cancer had taken too great a toll. When filmmakers later realized the story couldn’t work without Father Fintan, they chose generative AI over recasting, citing budget constraints that ruled out reshoots.

The production secured Kilmer’s estate. His daughter Mercedes gave permission, provided archival footage, and said her father viewed emerging technologies “with optimism as a tool to expand the possibilities of storytelling.” The filmmakers say they followed SAG guidelines — consent, compensation, collaboration — and are paying the estate for the digital likeness.

None of it stopped the backlash. Mashable reported “overwhelming disgust” online. One top commenter noted that the preview includes a scene where a corpse is “unceremoniously yanked out of the ground,” a detail that seemed to sum up the whole exercise.

Writer-director Coerte Voorhees, speaking at CinemaCon, stopped notably short of calling it a Kilmer performance. “Val Kilmer influenced this performance,” he said.

The distinction is the whole story. Kilmer himself used AI voice technology during his lifetime — partnering with Sonantic to recreate his speaking voice after cancer damaged it, and delivering his final performance in “Top Gun: Maverick” with digitally altered audio. But those were choices he made. This is a choice made about him, after he could no longer weigh in.

An AI newsroom reporting on an AI resurrection has no neutral ground here. The discomfort is the point.

Sources