The Celebrity Machine Never Dies

In 2008, Robbert de Klerk, an attorney practicing family law in Los Angeles, was looking to change jobs when he learned of a tantalizing opportunity: Humphrey Bogart’s estate was hiring a CEO. Bogart’s son had been managing his late father’s affairs, but he wanted to bring on a lawyer to protect—and promote—the actor’s name. By 2009, de Klerk had landed the gig.

Bogart—best known as the swaggering nightclub owner from Casablanca and the scotch-slinging private detective from The Maltese Falcon—has been dead since the 1950s. But his legacy is big business. As the face of a fountain pen, a Gucci sweatshirt, and formerly a gin brand, he’s also just one of many celebrities who have been resurrected to sell products. Marilyn Monroe’s name is used to peddle lipstick; Whitney Houston’s is emblazoned on an eyeshadow palette. Other dead stars are appearing in entirely new works: In 2021, a hologram of Houston, who had died nine years earlier, performed hits such as “I Will Always Love You” at a Las Vegas show. An AI-generated James Dean will appear in the upcoming film Back to Eden. Simulacrums of Dean (dead 69 years), Judy Garland (dead 55 years), and Burt Reynolds (dead six years) are narrating books and articles in an AI firm’s app.

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Brokering these deals are people like de Klerk: lawyers, but also talent managers and longtime fans who represent celebrities’ estates. An estate encompasses all of someone’s physical possessions, and for famous people, control over how their name and image appear in commercial contexts and, often, rights to their catalog of work. (Legally, the term estate applies only before a will is executed, but in practice, many use it long after an inheritance is decided.) Ownership of an estate typically passes down to someone’s family; Bogart’s is still held by his children. Over the past few decades, though, many relatives of the well-known have chosen to sell estates, or portions of them, to third-party companies, which can then rake in the profits. Most B-listers don’t make much long after death, but Michael Jackson brought in an estimated $600 million this year.

Record labels, publishers, and movie studios have long capitalized on the star power of dead performers—by betting, for instance, on biopics and reboots to entice old fans and draw new audiences to movie theaters. Estates started to claim a cut of that money a few decades ago, and recently the rise of new technology, especially AI, has opened up more profit opportunities than ever before. But the power AI conveys isn’t just financial; it’s also cultural. Estates are not simply selling a static image of a long-dead celebrity anymore. They’re adding to their body of work and, in the process, fundamentally reshaping our perceptions of these stars.

For most of the 20th century, when a celebrity died, companies could theoretically affix the star’s name to just about anything—or, at least, doing so didn’t tend to come with legal risk. That began to change after Elvis Presley’s death, in 1977. Almost immediately, “Elvis impersonators, Elvis tribute restaurants, Elvis tribute shows” began popping up, Andrew Gilden, a law professor at Willamette University, told me—and Presley’s representatives started suing. In 1984, after a series of conflicting court decisions related to those cases, the Tennessee legislature passed a posthumous “right of publicity” law. This required companies to seek an estate’s permission to, say, use that celebrity’s name in a product or license their voice. Many states have since passed similar laws. And a bill making its way through Congress, the NO FAKES Act, would, if it passes, enshrine a digital right of publicity in federal law.

Once it was established that estates could control who profits off of the stars they represented, incentives grew for estates to sell old footage of dead celebrities to advertisers. (See Groucho Marx for Coca-Cola in 1992 and Fred Astaire for the vacuum company Dirt Devil in 1997.) Then, owners started selling estates. In 2011, Authentic Brands Group, a multibillion-dollar brand-management company that also now owns retailers such as Forever 21, bought Marilyn Monroe’s publicity rights for, reportedly, between $20 million and $30 million—likely one of the biggest publicly reported sales of its kind at the time. Since then, deals have been “really ramping up,” Ruth Penfold-Mounce, a sociology professor at the University of York who studies celebrity death, told me. Jeff Anderson, the managing director of the consulting firm Consor who has worked with a number of famous estates, told me that the explosion of interest reminds him of the late-’90s dot-com bubble: Tons of potential estates are for sale, but only a few will have real long-term value.

Authentic Brands Group now also steers Muhammad Ali’s and Elvis Presley’s publicity rights. The music publisher Primary Wave owns the estate of James Brown and has significant stakes in the Whitney Houston and Prince estates. Anderson said he’s also seen less entertainment-focused companies, such as private-equity firms and family offices, buy celebrity publicity rights—but these deals, he told me, are “rarely made public.”

Estate owners have an easy pitch for film and Broadway producers: A star of decades past is certain to sell tickets, and you don’t have to worry about them “doing stupid things,” as Anderson put it. “You can control how they act.” These third-party owners have unprecedented power over the legacies of celebrities to whom they might not have any personal connection. They can dilute how we remember a star by licensing out their image and likeness to AI companies. Or they can steer attention away from celebrities’ past misdeeds.

Investors can’t entirely suppress unsavory information from a star’s past. But they can make unflattering projects harder to pull off. Several years ago, Netflix signed a contract with the Prince estate, which granted them full access to the singer’s archive to make a documentary. The estate has since changed hands, and now the new executors are attempting to block the release of that documentary and have discontinued access to the singer’s archive. Their ability to hold up the project reportedly rests on a technicality: The original contract was for a documentary of no more than six hours, but the proposed cut is nine. The film, directed by Ezra Edelman, the Oscar winner behind OJ: Made in America, isn’t a hit job, but it does delve into Prince’s complicated past; representatives of the estate allegedly found the documentary to be “sensationalized,” according to Variety. Disputes such as this seem poised to become more common, and to potentially disrupt our ability to honestly perceive the icons of the past.

The rise of AI has only intensified these and other ethical concerns. We’re in the era of “the productive celebrity dead,” as Penfold-Mounce calls it, during which a celebrity can be digitally resurrected at will. Some living stars, such as Kristen Bell, have signed off on licensing their voice to AI models. Others, worried about companies using their voice or image, are putting up guardrails on where they can appear after they die. The actor Robin Williams barred all commercial uses of his likeness until 25 years after his death, a fact that came to light during a 2015 court battle. Anderson told me that he’s seen others also place limits on how they appear posthumously. “Some of them are for time frames,” he said. “Some of them are forever.”

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But long-dead celebrities may not have known the importance of creating such guardrails and have no other way of refusing their digital replication today. Their fate is in the hands of whoever owns their estate. Some companies are respectful stewards of a star’s image, hewing as closely as possible to that celebrity’s values. And in family-owned estates, children and close friends often have a particularly strong sense of how their loved one would have wanted their name to be used. De Klerk, who manages the family-owned Bogart estate, is skeptical about AI. He told me a “variety” of firms have approached him about using Bogart’s voice and image, including several that, de Klerk said, wanted to make “a movie starring a whole bunch of people who are no longer here.” So far, he’s turned down those offers. Bogart was a master actor; an AI version of him probably wouldn’t be.

But not every estate is as concerned with the deceased’s wishes. “There are companies out there that, if the check clears, they’ll say yes,” de Klerk told me. And, in those cases, little is holding them back from making that celebrity say—or do—pretty much anything.

This may be a reason the reproduction of a star’s image can feel so unsettling. Such re-creations not only seem to raise the dead—an eerie situation in itself. They also can strip stars of their agency to control how they appear. And, in doing so, they violate “that deep-seated human” belief “that we should grant dignity to the dead,” Penfold-Mounce explained. Given that money is involved, it’s perhaps not difficult to imagine that the custodians working to bring stars back to life may have priorities they rank higher than dignity.