10 Great Movies That Accidentally Made Cinema Worse
4. Furious 7 Proved Hollywood Could Believably Resurrect Dead Actors
Furious 7 is unquestionably one of the strongest films in the Fast and Furious franchise, and an all the more impressive achievement considering the tragic death of Paul Walker mid-production.
In order to complete Walker's role as Brian O'Conner, Peter Jackson's VFX company Weta Digital was hired to create a lifelike CGI model of Walker from existing footage, which would then be mapped onto body doubles played by Walker's brothers Caleb and Cody.
The end result is generally terrific, with only a few distracting moments where the digital seams become visible. Given the enormous pressure the production was under, though, it's tough to argue with how it turned out.
The problem, however, is that Furious 7 proved beyond any doubt that Hollywood could believably "resurrect" dead actors, and so in the years that followed we've had numerous films featuring long-dead performers.
The most prominent examples are Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One and Harold Ramis as Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and while the estates of each actor signed off on their inclusion, does that really make it right?
At the end of the day, a person's image is still being manipulated without their consent - being dead and all - and one suspects that as VFX become ever-more photoreal in the coming years, especially with deepfake technology finding its place in Hollywood, we're going to get much more of this.
Hollywood executives are likely already imagining the many late, great actors they could make new movies with, and while the technology itself is extremely impressive, we'll follow Ian Malcolm's wisdom on this one:
"You were so preoccupied with whether you could, you didn't stop to think if you should."