It's a daft stance though by the industry and one that's going to be forced upon them. The scrambling for digital imaging rights over the last few years for stars past and present by the studios, added to execs wanting to lower costs means its inevitable. Vfx acting all noble when in reality they're just a shop front for cheap Asian labour is pretty moot. A.I. Its going to blow it all apart.
I don't know. it's a political/economical/legal quagmire for them, too. And will be for quite some time. The inertia against it is still great. And it already
has been forced upon them by the technology; hence the scramble, which was a bit of a mad dash for toilet-paper - none of them is exactly sure when they're actually going to use all that extra.
The Vfx thing quickly becomes incredibly complicated once you start down that road. Yes, them now posturing like 'they stand with the actors' for leverage is like you say, but they know the studios would still have the bottleneck of generating a great face only to slap it on a poor performance. (Unless someone trains an incredibly nuanced AI on a vast library of entire physical performances, but that's getting into
Matrix territory)
As for
when major DF might happen: I don't know. Personally I think there's an outside chance we might get the odd usage of it in maybe a TV show or something like a
Deadpool movie - likely mostly for comedic effect (
"Hey everyone, it was just for fun"). But also that it's going to be a long time before we see it done in any serious capacity, especially with a major star.
Paradoxically, part of the reason is going to be how easy it is. Even now, a dude or dudette in their bedroom with enough time can do it. So right now, there's very little to gain from doing it; it's a whole lot of hoopla for something that ANYONE can change.
Which is why I don't think we'll really see a major single usage of it until twenty-thirty years from now when:
a. some of our current 'superstars' pass away and there's potential for a resultant large-scale demand for them in particular. And orders-of-magnitude more significantly:
b. if there's a huge - and i mean freaking huuuge - franchise linked to said deceased star and thus an overwhelming tsunami of fan desire against any 'recasting'. (AKA potential $$$$$ difference between recasting and '
being faithful to the performance and character that the deceased embodied' or whatever publicist-speak they'll use.)
And again, the key factor being that if you don't do it, someone else is going to.
For example, if a certain whip-wielding archeologist actor were to go to the big museum in the sky in 2040. And DF is absolutely ubiquitous; it's just everywhere, like memes and photoshop now. So if you don't do it yourself, a million bored fans across the world are going to do it and upload it anyways. And so a few years down the road the studio in 2048 goes: '
Hey superfans, we're not going to recast, we're just bringing back Henricksen Cadillac's digital likeness in the role.'
Right now and for the forseeable it's just too weird between the acting guilds and big agencies and the houses to imagine anything but some stunt usage like the James Dean thing in the works, or effects touch-up work to get around reshoot scheduling issues on a major show.
