At CinemaCon in Las Vegas, brothers Coerte and John Voorhees showed the first footage of a digitally recreated Val Kilmer in their historical drama As Deep as the Grave. Kilmer had been cast before the pandemic as Father Fintan, a tuberculosis-stricken missionary in the American southwest, but illness forced him out, and he died in April 2025. When the project resumed, the filmmakers approached his children, Mercedes and Jack, who agreed and opened his video archive so the actor could be rebuilt at several ages. The brothers would not describe the technical method beyond calling it painstaking and iterative, and said they followed SAG-AFTRA's three Cs of consent, compensation and collaboration. Their argument is that a family-approved resurrection shows the right way to do something that is currently a free-for-all. Whether audiences agree is the debate the film is walking into.
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