Alien: Romulus' weird Ian Holm CGI gets fixed for Disney+: Here's 5 other digital resurrections that weren't so lucky

Alien: Romulus is a candidate for the best movie in the series since Aliens. But one part of it was pretty contentious to say the least.

The film brought back Ian Holm, who died in 2020, as a part digital recreation of the man we saw in the 1979 original. It was, well, not great. A bit uncanny. A bit "2009 video game character".

But director Fede Alvarez says the team has worked on improving the effects for the Blu-ray and streaming release, which comes to Disney Plus on January 15.

“It’s so much better,” Alvarez claims.

“We made it better for the release right now. I convinced the studio we need to spend the money and make sure we give the companies that were involved in making it the proper time to finish it and do it right,” he told Empire.

The original process used a mix of CGI and an animatronic, which Alvarez says was made using a head cast from the production of The Lord of the Rings.

“I wasn’t 100 per cent happy with some of the shots, where you could feel a bit more the CG intervention. So, for people that react negatively, I don’t blame them,” says Alvarez.

The new version of Holm apparently makes greater use of the animatronic, with less of the CGI face texture pasted on top. It all went a bit “PlayStation 3 game” at points in the theatrical version.

The digital afterlife

The production did get the consent of the Ian Holm estate before digitally resurrecting the actor, but it’s a reminder of how often these CGI takes on people end up landing right in uncanny valley.

And they’re often the movies with budgets among the largest in Hollywood too.

2023’s The Flash featured a rather plastic-looking cameo from Christopher Reeve as Superman, alongside the Nic-Cage-as-Superman that never came to be:

Carrie Fisher has been digitally summoned at least twice, first as a young Leia in 2016’s Rogue One, then again after her real-world death for The Rise of Skywalker:

Rogue One also featured a resurrected Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin — which has resulted in a legal case being brought under the claim Cushing entered an agreement to stop unapproved use of his image before his death:

Then there was the recreation of Harold Ramis in Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Some people’s hearts may have been in the right place for that one, but when a big part of the audience’s reaction is “yikes” you have to wonder if it was a great idea in the first place:

One of the few times filmmakers have got away with it is with Oliver Reed in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. Reed died during filming, forcing the production to finish off his scenes with body doubles and CGI. And, 25 years on, the CGI reliant scenes are not actually too obvious.

We’ll be catching up with Alien: Romulus to see how the tweaked Ian Holm's scenes fare later this week.

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