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These days, you can still add to your IMDb page — well after you die.
When Netflix debuts its Willy Wonka-themed competition series, “Wonka’s The Golden Ticket” next month, it will return Gene Wilder to his most famous role — despite being dead since 2016.
Wilder’s Wonka will host the series that pits contestants against each other inside a recreation of the famous factory from the 1971 classic, “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.” But it won’t be a mere recording. Wilder’s voice will be omnipresent via generative AI, promising the winner “a lifetime supply of money.” (Guess chocolate ain’t what it used to be?)
While some fans may find it all half-baked — reactions to “AI Wonka” have ranged from “groan-inducing” to “haunting” — Wilder’s widow, Karen B. Wilder, signed off on the use of her late husband’s voice, saying it “celebrates the warmth and imagination that he brought to the role, introducing that magic to a new generation while honoring the fans who have cherished it for decades.”
Wilder is part of a growing list of deceased celebs being revived using AI. The practice is leading to some thorny ethical questions for their heirs, like, what’s the line between honoring someone’s memory and cynically profiting off the valuable likeness of a famous relative who isn’t around to endorse the idea?
“People are anxious about the clapback of the public feeling that they’re exploiting these beloved celebrities who are gone,” Adam Streisand, a partner at Sheppard, tells Page Six Hollywood. (Streisand’s clients have included the estates of Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Michael Jackson and Ray Charles.) “There are conversations about, ‘How would dad feel about this?’ And those are really heavy conversations.”
Streisand is one of many lawyers involved in estate planning that tell P6H the AI question is coming up more.
Sharon Klein, president of family wealth for Wilmington Trust, which advises high-net-worth clients, points out that stars like Wilder died years before any of us knew AI was a thing. “Nobody really knows what he would have wanted,” she says. “We don’t know what their intent was.” For many fans, “it feels like exploitation to drag them up from the grave and use their voices,” Klein argues.
“But maybe fans would be more accepting, and it would feel less like exploitation if you knew the celebrity said, ‘I want my image leveraged around it. I want my image used. I want my voice used,’” Klein adds.
“I think it’s inevitable that it is going to be a source of tremendous economic opportunity, and that’s going to create pressure on heirs to want to take advantage of that opportunity,” Streisand continues. “The purists are probably winning out, but I suspect over time that the demand and opportunity is going to be so great that you’re going to see a lot more of it.”
Battles over deceased celebrities’ names and likenesses have been waged for years. But in the AI era, such rights have become exponentially more valuable. James Earl Jones became the first to do such a deal when he signed over the rights to his voice as “Star Wars” character Darth Vader in 2022 (he died in 2024) — though he entrusted them with LucasFilm, the franchise’s studio.
The newfound market for AI recreations has propped up some businesses.
Wilder’s voice is being recreated in partnership with ElevenLabs, the San Francisco-based AI firm that launched in 2023. Since then, it’s been acquiring licenses from well-known estates like Stan Lee, Maya Angelou and Alan Turing (and some still-living actors like Sir Michael Caine and David Hasselhoff). Last year, the company launched its “Iconic Marketplace,” essentially a clearinghouse to facilitate the use of voices and other likenesses in commercial and creative works, and added Matthew McConaughey as an investor.
CMG Worldwide, a 40-year-old management firm known for handling IP rights for hundreds of celebrity estates, is behind many of these AI deals. Two years ago, it signed an agreement that enabled ElevenLabs to use the voices of Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds and Sir Laurence Olivier.
“It permeates everything we do,” says Mark Roesler, chairman and founder of CMG Worldwide, He says that among his biggest clients are Albert Einstein and Neil Armstrong.
“With these digital replicas. Celebrities never die. Celebrities are immortal. Death is no impediment to being a celebrity,” says Klein.
Coerte Voorhees’s upcoming movie “As Deep as the Grave” features an AI recreation of Val Kilmer — who died last year of throat cancer — in a major role. The decision predictably drew controversy, but Kilmer’s estate including his daughter, Mercedes, signed off on it.
She told “Today” back in April: “We have to contend with this technology one way or the other. And avoiding it, it’s not necessarily the way. It’s much easier to structure the rights if you proactively license something.”
The current legal framework that governs port-mortem right of publicity — which prevents the unauthorized commercial use of an individual’s name and likeness — is woefully inadequate, legal experts tell us.
There’s no federal standard for the length of post-mortem rights. It’s instead a patchwork of individual state rights that can vary between 10 and 100 years. (Some state laws are mere statutes that could theoretically be tested in court.)
In California, post mortem rights extend 70 years past death. Over the past two years, the state has amended its statute to include digital replicas, and to add the ability to request a restraining order, rather than just monetary compensation.
Either way, expect all your favorite dead celebrities to have a second life thanks to AI. “I think we are at the very beginning of an AI takeover of the world that’s so much more vast than I think we even can imagine” says Streisand. “The pressures on people to take advantage of these opportunities are going to be so great.”
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