On March 19, Nigerian filmmaker Jade Osiberu saw something on X that disturbed her. It was a report from Variety about Top Gun star Val Kilmer being resurrected via AI to appear in the new movie As Deep as the Grave. Kilmer had been cast in the film in 2020, five years before his death on April 1, 2025, but never made it to set amid his throat cancer battle. With the full blessing of his daughter, Mercedes, an AI version of the actor is now appearing in the film. Mercedes suggested that her father would have approved, saying he “always looked at emerging technologies with optimism as a tool to expand the possibilities of storytelling.”

FIRST LOOK: Val Kilmer has been resurrected via AI to star in the new movie "As Deep as the Grave."

Kilmer was cast in the movie in 2020, five years before his death. But he was too sick amid his throat cancer battle to ever make it to set. Now an AI version of the actor is… pic.twitter.com/OjWHUdrsXn

— Variety (@Variety) March 18, 2026

Osiberu was neither impressed nor in agreement. She wrote on X that the action held a grim future for art: “This is horrible on so many levels… I hope the entire distribution ecosystem decides to reject this because if this is allowed to make even a cent, then unfortunately, the future would be quite grim indeed.” She added that bringing “dead actors back to live [sic] and commercialising their image is beyond dystopian and has far reaching consequences.”

It’s one thing to create entirely new characters with AI much like animations do. It still has its ethical questions because it’s all based on other people’s work but you can at least argue for that. Bringing dead actors back to live and commercializing their image is beyond…

— Jade Osiberu (@jadeosiberu) March 19, 2026

As is often the case with the ongoing AI conversation, not everyone agrees. In the May 25 edition of the Loose Talk Podcast, veteran journalist Osagie Alonge said anyone who shared the filmmaker’s view was simply not ready for the future. “Ladies and gentlemen, if this is how you think, you are not ready for the future… For people who have kids, if this is how you think, you’re not preparing them for the future,” he said.

Alonge argued that technology has always advanced and disrupted existing infrastructure. And history backs him up. VCDs and DVDs rendered the VCR obsolete. Then streaming pushed VCDs and DVDs to the backseat. Technology always evolves and humans have to keep up. Or do we?

In his response to Osiberu’s fears about AI replacing human actors, Alonge advocated embracing the development fully. “People have started using AI to recreate people that have long gone. How do I do a new blockbuster movie and put Olu Jacobs? I’m not saying he’s passed away, I’m just saying, get a young Olu Jacobs with AI… That is what I want to be hearing you saying now, as a filmmaker,” he said. “Why do we keep thinking that bringing somebody or using someone’s identity when they pass away is a bad thing? You think I don’t want to see a new blockbuster Muhammad Ali movie — his mannerism and everything? I’ll pay top dollar for it now.”

And there lies the dilemma for today’s film industries like Nollywood. Where do you draw the line?

The Osiberu-Alonge debate is really a proxy for a much deeper question the industry can no longer afford to defer. Because the truth is, both of them are right and both of them are also missing something.

Osiberu’s alarm is not merely sentimental. It is structural. When you normalise resurrecting dead actors with AI, you create a marketplace logic that does not stop at the deceased. Producers and studios, especially those operating on Nollywood’s notoriously tight margins, will inevitably ask: why hire a living actor at all? If you can render a young Olu Jacobs for a fraction of the cost, why negotiate with Tobi Bakre? Why deal with a difficult star’s demands when you can simply generate a compliant digital version? The slippery slope is not hypothetical, it is already the economics of the situation, and it disproportionately threatens the mid-level and upcoming talent who cannot trade on their irreplaceability the way A-listers can. For a Nollywood ecosystem that already underpays its crew and struggles to protect intellectual property, this is not a future problem. It is arriving now as another X user, a software engineer, Clinton Nzedimma, told Osiberu: “For you filmmakers it’s [AI is] part of your future now.”

It is the new normal
Tech people already accepted AI doing work now

For you filmmakers it’s part of your future now

Anyway AI should allow Nollywood produce more ambitions projects that involve CGI now https://t.co/Cw15wdwfHZ

— Son of Camp Nou (@clintonnzedimma) March 19, 2026

But Alonge’s point deserves more than a dismissive recoil. There is something genuinely compelling about the creative possibility he is gesturing at. Nigerian cinema has a rich archive of legends — Hubert Ogunde, Baba Sala, Moladun (Monsurat Omidina) — whose physical presence in new stories would carry a kind of cultural electricity no newcomer can replicate. If AI makes it possible to tell those stories more vividly, is that not worth something? And when it comes to deceased performers who left behind clear records of how they moved, how they delivered a line, how they inhabited a character, is using that archive to honour their legacy really more offensive than, say, releasing posthumous albums, as the music industry has done for decades?

The honest answer is: it depends entirely on the framework around it.

What Nollywood — and, frankly, the global film industry — urgently needs is not a blanket embrace or rejection of AI actors. It needs governance. It needs an ethical architecture. That means explicit consent frameworks, so that no actor’s likeness is ever recreated without documented prior authorisation, whether they are living or dead. It means revenue-sharing models that ensure digital performances still flow income to estates and surviving families. It means union-level protections — something the Screen Actors Guild strike in Hollywood in 2023 was partly about — that prevent studios from using AI to hollow out the profession from the inside. And it means a public culture of transparency, so that when audiences watch an AI-rendered performance, they know it. The deception is where the real ethical rot lives.

Nigeria’s creative community is not powerless here. The Theatre Arts and Motion Pictures Practitioners Association of Nigeria (TAMPAN), the Actors Guild of Nigeria (AGN), and other industry bodies have a window — right now, before the technology fully normalises — to negotiate the terms of AI’s entry into Nollywood. The alternative is not preserving the status quo. The alternative is waking up five years from now to find that the terms were set by platforms and tech companies, not by the people whose art is being replicated. As the Founder of Jamit, an audio storytelling platform, Ike Orizu, puts it in his response to Osiberu, “if studios don’t move on this, fans and bad actors will, with the tools that already exist or coming up.”

Unpopular opinion here, we're moving into a synthesized world era and there's no going back

We were fine when instruments got digitized. A person can tap pads and keys and literally play a full orchestra

We synthesized music production and called it innovation

People's… https://t.co/0lFxvGIWDh

— Ike Orizu (@iKEOrizu) March 19, 2026

Osiberu is right that this moment is a test. Alonge is right that refusing to engage with it is its own kind of failure. The real question is not whether AI actors are coming to Nollywood. They are. The question is who gets to decide the rules before they arrive: filmmakers, actors and guilds, or tech companies and platforms.