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eppur_se_muova

(41,234 posts)
2. I just finished reading "Remake" by Connie Willis, about just this thing ....
Mon Feb 2, 2026, 03:57 PM
Monday

all the big movie "deals" become copyright battles in the future. Any star with box office appeal gets put in the lead role of one remake after another, and editing w/CGS is so routine that 2nd-rate hackers can churn out their own versions of every movie every made, and viewers can choose whichever version they want, including the version(s) of Casablanca with a happy ending. Actors only get hired as body doubles, or have their faces scanned and inserted into existing scenes. The heroine of the story wants to dance on film ... but nobody's making musicals, and haven't since the Sixties.

An interesting premise for a plot, and Willis is a Hell of a writer, but there are some odd things taken for granted that SF fans will recognize as based on familiar tropes, but non-SF fans (or SF non-fans, to cover all the extremes) might get completely lost over. Casual teleportation, for example, not really explained but very consequential to the story.

Of course, I've been saying "live actors are finished" since about 1980, so I've had to wait for a long time be proven prescient -- only no around then remembers me saying it. (Believe it or not, things haven't yet gone as far as I'm expecting, though some of the AI slop on Xitter comes close -- it's just the material that's brain-dead.)

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