I want more Blade Runner movies. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. And some day, probably sooner than any of us expect, I’ll get them, starring a digital Harrison Ford licensed from his estate, younger than he was in 1982 and available forever.
Think about how perfect that is. Blade Runner is a franchise about artificial copies of human beings, so good you can’t tell them from the real thing. Fans have argued for forty years over whether Deckard is secretly a replicant. In the bespoke sequel, the question would finally be settled. He would be one. So would the actor playing him.
It would be jarring at first. Then we’d get used to it, the way we got used to watching movies full of people who are long dead. But I think it changes more than we’re ready for, and the fights over it have already started.
The King Goes to Court
Elvis Presley’s rights holders are now suing two AI companies at once, over two different parts of him.
In October they sued Anthropic, the maker of Claude, alleging it trained on the lyrics of 274 songs Presley recorded. This month they sued Suno, the AI music generator, under Tennessee’s 2024 ELVIS Act, a law written to protect an artist’s voice and likeness from unauthorized commercial use. The claim is that Suno lets anyone generate new songs in Presley’s voice. Eminem’s publisher filed its own suit against Suno the same week. The Elvis complaint has the line of the year: the next Elvis won’t pick up a guitar.
One suit is about the songs. The other is about the man. That split is where the real argument lives.
A teenager in 1960 could learn the swagger of “All Shook Up” off the radio and write his own rock song. Nobody sued him. But he didn’t come out singing in Elvis’s actual voice, and he couldn’t turn out ten thousand songs a day for anyone who typed “Elvis” into a box. Influence is fair game. Impersonation for sale is where the law starts to bite.
This isn’t new. Bette Midler won a case against Ford Motor Company in 1988 over a sound-alike singer in a car commercial. Tom Waits won a similar fight against Frito-Lay a few years later. Meanwhile, the guy in the white jumpsuit on the Las Vegas Strip is fine. He’s performing, the way a drag queen is performing. The line was never really about copying a voice. It’s about using the copy to sell something.
Two Keys
The dead are already back at work. Peter Cushing was digitally recreated for Rogue One more than twenty years after he died, with his estate’s blessing. James Earl Jones signed off, before he died, on letting AI recreate his Darth Vader voice. A licensed, endlessly reusable Harrison Ford is just the scaled-up version.
But Ford’s estate wouldn’t hold the most valuable key. Disney owns Indiana Jones and Han Solo. Blade Runner belongs to a different company entirely. The estate can license the face, but the studio controls the character. An endless bespoke Han Solo needs both keys turned at once, and you can guess which side will try to pay less.
I’m more of an estate-rights guy than you might think. I believe a dead artist’s voice and image should be protected. But not forever. Songs eventually enter the public domain; “Can’t Help Falling in Love” should get there around 2056. If the voice right never expires, we get an odd result: anyone could record the song, but nobody could make it sound like the man who made it famous. The voice would outlive the song. That’s backwards.
And “estate” increasingly means a brand-licensing company, not grandchildren. The lead plaintiff in the Elvis suits is Authentic Brands Group. A perpetual voice right doesn’t protect a family’s memory. It creates a trademark with a pulse.
The Uncanny Ceiling
Here’s the part I didn’t see coming. Suppose the digital Ford got so good it acted better than Ford ever did. Would that be a triumph?
No. It would be a failure. Part of getting past the uncanny valley is that the copy can’t outperform the original. The moment Deckard delivers a line with a range Harrison Ford never had, the audience feels it: that isn’t him. To pass as Ford, the copy has to stay inside Ford’s box, the one we already know from 1977 through 1989.
So a licensed persona can repeat the man, but it can never grow. A living actor gets older, takes strange roles, fails, surprises you. The digital one is pinned forever to the version of him we loved best. It’s not an actor. It’s a greatest-hits album that talks.
The Frozen Canon
Now put those pieces together. Personas that last forever, controlled by studios and brand companies, that can never get better than their best-known version.
If a studio can rent a young Harrison Ford indefinitely, why would it gamble on an unknown? A new star is a risk: unproven, expensive to build up, liable to flop. A licensed legend is a sure thing with a ready-made audience. The Elvis lawyers saw it coming for music, and it applies to film just as well: the next Harrison Ford won’t get cast.
We already live with a version of this. Hollywood leans on sequels and reboots, and radio leans on classic rock. But until now, the old stars had the decency to age and die. Licensed personas remove that last natural limit. Pop culture could freeze into a permanent 1980s, a matinee that never lets out.
The Same Deal in the News
In my last post, Must-Carry, I wrote about the agentic news future: you’ll have an Anchor agent that convenes a panel of Correspondents, some of them scanned personas, some of them institutions like the New York Times. The persona economy I’m describing here is the same machine, pointed at entertainment instead of news.
And it’ll run on the same business model. The frontier labs sit in the catbird seat, so they get paid for placement. Some Correspondents will come bundled free with your $20 monthly subscription. Good enough, already there, and very hard for a paid Times Correspondent to compete with. Microsoft did this to Netscape by giving Internet Explorer away inside Windows, and the government sued. Expect the same fight again.
The free tier will run on advertorials. That’s worse than it sounds. An ad on a newspaper page is visibly separate from the news. An advertorial inside your Anchor speaks in the same voice as your briefing, in a private session no media critic will ever see. When Walter Cronkite framed a story, millions of people saw the same framing, and anyone could call him out. Your Anchor’s framing is yours alone.
Anchors should be forced to tell you when a sponsor shaped an answer. I doubt they will be.
So here’s where I think it all lands. People with money will pay for the real thing: the Living Correspondent, the unsponsored panel, the new artist instead of the licensed legend. Everyone else gets the permanent matinee, the free bundle of familiar faces, comfortable and sponsored and never surprising.
I’ll still watch Blade Runner 5. I’ll just know who’s paying for my ticket.
