BY JAMES TROUGHTON
PUBLISHED 15 HOURS AGO
The Flash is DC’s answer to the MCU’s multiverse saga, morphing what was once an interesting narrative device into an arm’s race on who can get the most fan-favourite cameos. Spider-Man: No Way Home got a headstart with Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, so The Flash brought in Michael Keaton. As leaks reveal, it also features Christopher Reeve, Adam West, and George Reaves. Unlike the cameos that came before, these three are dead actors, but they were brought back to fulfil a similar goal - nostalgia bait. But what joy is there in lifeless puppets with the faces of dead actors?
It’s a disservice to their entire careers, tarnishing their legacies. Christopher Reeves’ last ‘appearance’ in film is now an action figure conjured to lull audiences with mindless nostalgia. We should’ve heard the alarm bells when Peter Cushing was brought back for Rogue One, we should have raised the pitchforks after deepfake Carrie Fisher, and we should have demanded it all end when Ghostbusters: Afterlife resurrected Harold Ramis. Instead, we cheered it on.
It sets a dangerous precedent for cinema. It means actors can be cast in roles without their consent post-mortem. It’s one thing for a studio to have the rights to your character and the story you’re in, it’s another to have the rights to you. The Flash didn’t bring back Superman, it brought back Christopher Reeve and tried to pass it off as him playing the character in what looks like a poorly rendered PS3 cutscene. He didn’t. There’s no performance here.
Estates and families may give permission, but that doesn’t make it ethical. Even if they claim that the actor would’ve been fine with it, the actor can’t read the script or understand the wider context of the film because they’re dead. Reeve might’ve hated the direction of his Superman in The Flash, Adam West might not have been interested in a multiversal story with two other Batmen, we don’t know. The second they die, that door closes, and with it, their take on these characters should be left alone, the torch passing to the next.
Directors like the Russo brothers want to take things a step further. They recently discussed a world in which we could bring dead celebrities like Marilyn Monroe back to life with AI that would write romcoms starring us, the viewer, literally letting us live out our fantasies. This is unsettling for all the same reasons as Reeve, but it also positions celebrities—disproportionately women—as objects who exist, even beyond death, just to serve our needs. We’re already seeing that with deepfake porn of Twitch streamers and famous movie stars, because the endgame of fan service and nostalgia bait is turning celebrities into literal commodities without consent. Normalising the use of CGI to bring your favourite superheroes back to life is barely a domino away from a culture where tech is used to rip people’s own likeness away from them to satisfy our own selfish desires.
Even if you’re on board with bringing back old characters ad nauseam, there are already better solutions than CGI necromancy. Superman Returns continued the Christopher Reeve movies with Brandon Routh as the titular hero. He then reprised the role in the CW Crisis on Infinite Earths event, and Routh is still alive and well. Roles are recast and other actors make them their own all the time. Having an actual actor give a performance means they can interact with the world organically and explore their character in more nuanced ways, whereas Reeve awkwardly looks off into the distance with a blank expression separate from everybody else. What does it add to the story? What does it tell us about his character? Nothing, it’s only there to make old fans feel young again.
In Rogue One, an early example of this abuse of art, Cushing looked uncanny and cartoonish, standing out in every single scene he was in—but, again, there was already a precedent. Cushing’s character, Grand Moff Tarkin, had been recast in Revenge of the Sith and The Clone Wars, so to drag him out of the grave to put on the costume not only felt insensitive, but completely unnecessary. If the idea was to seamlessly flow with A New Hope, don’t use their characters. Tarkin could’ve been any Imperial general, or the movie could’ve given Darth Vader and Orson Krennic more prominent roles. Even the improved Luke Skywalker in The Book of Boba Fett felt off because of a monotone AI voice that failed to capture any of the emotion of Mark Hamill’s performance. You need actors to act, and the fact I need to say that is bizarre. Recast, put their roles to rest, anything but what we’re doing. Ten years ago if you needed a young Luke Skywalker you’d give someone like Sebastian Stan a phone call and a new legacy would be born.
It’s as much about nostalgia bait as it is about the vanity of creatives and higher-ups who want to live out an impossible fantasy. The Flash director Andy Muschiette said that, in regards to cameos, “everything was allowed”. He said, “I made a list of superheroes that I love, that I would love to see… then, for pacing, we had to shortlist that a little bit.”
The idea of Adam West and Christopher Reeve on screen together is exciting and I get Muschiette’s joy at being able to make that a reality, but the actors are dead and with them that possibility. We shouldn’t puppeteer their corpses to live out our childhood dreams, we should cast new people and tell new stories. That’s the line in the sand we need to draw, that the dead should be left dead, rather than gleefully saying “everything was allowed” like a kid who has been handed a box of toys to smush together. These are real people, not action figures.
Instead of Christopher Reeve, we could’ve seen Routh or Tyler Hoechlin, and instead of Adam West, we could’ve had Christian Bale. There are always other options—living people. But even the very-much-alive Helen Slater was CGI, once again making it clear that the endgame is to strip down the role of actors and artists, paying them less and charging fans more for spoonfed nostalgia.
Like most recent tech controversies, higher-ups want to hasten the process of making ‘art’, whether that’s getting rid of writers and replacing them with AI, using AI to replicate an actor’s voice as we saw with Luke Skywalker, or using CGI to bring people to life. But art without people is meaningless—there’s no substance or critique, no personal meaning or history bleeding into the plot to tell stories that we can relate to. It’s just a stream of by-the-numbers content that tries to cater to everyone, but ironically ends up so dull and lifeless it won’t resonate with anyone. Hopefully, The Flash will prove to be the final nail in the coffin for CGI actors, showing general audiences what a truly horrific and bad idea it is. But since people are more concerned about being ‘spoiled’ in regards to a slideshow of dead faces, I’m not optimistic.
