10 Ways That Movies Will Change In The 2020s

One much debated trend of movies in the 2010s which isn't going anywhere any time soon is digital de-ageing of actors. Over the last few months it has cropped up in everything from Marvel blockbusters to Martin Scorsese awards-bait, not to mention making the kids from IT look like slightly younger kids.

It is a related phenomenon, however, which will likely become markedly more prevalent over the coming years: digital resurrection of long dead actors.

The technology and the concept have actually been around for quite a while. Cult 2000s fave Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow sold itself in part on the novelty of casting Laurence Olivier as the villain despite him having died twelve years earlier, the effect achieved by digital manipulation of footage and audio from the BBC archive. But Sky Captain bombed at the box office, which put this gimmick on the back burner too.

As the 2010s have gone on, though, we have seen it getting a resurgence in bringing dead actors back to their old franchises thanks to digital effects, most prominently Peter Cushing in Rogue One along with Carrie Fisher in The Rise Of Skywalker.

Digitally reviving actors for roles that they did actually sign up for in their lifetimes is one thing, but the next potential step is more of the Sky Captain-Olivier route of freshly casting a dead actor in an all new project and using it to generate promotional press attention, even if in outrage.

The casting of James Dean six decades after his death in upcoming Vietnam War dog movie Finding Jack generated a lot of criticism recently, but it also drummed up a lot of publicity for the indie flick. And that will almost certainly not be the last time a dead star is digitally resurrected to headline a completely new project in the 2020s.