During the past five years, cinema and television have undergone two evolutionary steps. One is that on-demand online streaming from among entire studio or network inventories is replacing the scheduled programming of over-the-air, cable, or satellite delivery systems as the predominant means by which most consumers obtain such entertainment. That is primarily a business model change.
However, the second evolutionary step reached is a potentially huge change in the creative model: namely that computer-generated imagery can now reproduce any actor(s)’s visage, voice, and way of movement, so exactly and in such high resolution that the performance of the computer-generated version of the actor is indistinguishable on screen from that of the real actor.
Here is a (19-minute) remarkable interview in which Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss, the stars of ‘The Matrix’ fantasy films (which are ironically about perceiving what is or is not real, and in the latest installment of which both the real and CGI versions of themselves were utilized) seriously discuss the ramifications of this technological evolution.