Digital Ages: Exploring the Industrial, Formal, and Theoretic Implications of Hollywood's Digital De-ageing Trend

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Since computer-generated imagery (CGI) was first used to de-age sexagenarian actors in X-Men: The Last Stand (Ratner, 2006), the popularity of and discussion surrounding digital de-ageing have exponentially increased. Indeed, Hollywood released nine products in 2022 that feature digital de-ageing, nearly doubling the output of their second-most prolific year. Further, the implementation of digital de-ageing technology has become both a primary marketing draw for new releases (Loock, 2021: 221) and a forerunner in conversations about job generation and career longevity (King, 2011: 258). Despite nearly twenty years of this expanding presence, digital de-ageing-whether it be minute edits that smooth wrinkles and sharpen jawlines or comprehensive CGI re-renderings-remains predominantly effected upon white male bodies (Holliday, 2022: 231). Hollywood has still not used this technology to de-age non-white women, Asian men, or disabled people (among other minority groups). It therefore becomes evident that this rapid increase in digital de-ageing carries high entertainment, economic, and sociocultural implications.To investigate-and ultimately argue a stance on-this trend's broader societal effects, it is necessary to comprehensively understand its impact on film form, industry, and theory. Drawing on existing research into digitisation's wider destabilisation of film ontology, burgeoning scholarship on digital de-ageing has begun to discuss such implications. For example, complementing Barry King's (2011) claim that digital effects hinder corporal star image signification, scholarship on digital de-ageing focusses on the trend's destabilisation of (white, male) star careers' temporally-fixed nature (Holliday, 2022; Loock, 2021) and prevailing notions of 'acting' (Bode, 2010; Holliday, 2022). Scholars have thus begun to explore this trend's effects on film and academic conceptionthereof