Val Kilmer has been gone for months, and yet he keeps showing up in theaters.
That's the odd, bittersweet reality of the actor's posthumous release schedule, which has turned his final performances into a slow, rolling goodbye that fans weren't fully prepared for.
The latest wrinkle arrived this week, when a long-delayed indie project featuring Kilmer quietly landed on streaming and immediately started climbing the charts.
It's not even a particularly good movie, by most accounts.
But that hasn't stopped viewers from pressing play, because it's him, one more time, in a role he filmed while quietly battling the illness that would eventually take his life.
What's driving the surge isn't nostalgia alone.
It's the same instinct that made his memoir and documentary so devastating: people want to watch someone who kept working, kept showing up, kept being an actor even when his voice was failing him.
There's something almost defiant about it, and audiences are responding to that defiance more than they're responding to the film itself.
The reaction online has split into two camps, and the divide says a lot about how we treat artists at the end of their lives.
One side calls it a tender tribute, a chance to appreciate a singular career one last time.
The other side calls it ghoulish, arguing that studios are cashing in on a man who can no longer consent to how his image gets used.
Both arguments have teeth, and neither is going away.
His family has stayed largely quiet, which only fuels speculation.
That silence is understandable, but it also leaves the narrative in the hands of distributors and fans, and neither group has a particularly strong track record of restraint.
Every new release becomes a referendum on his legacy whether anyone wants that or not.
Meanwhile, the retrospective screenings keep selling out.
Theaters in New York and Los Angeles have added late-night showings of his best-known work, and the crowds skew younger than you'd expect.
A generation that grew up on streaming is discovering what made him magnetic in the first place, and they're doing it in the same breath as mourning him.
Most actors get one wave of appreciation when they die and then a slow fade.
Kilmer is getting something more drawn out, more complicated, and arguably more honest about how messy a career like his really was.
The real question isn't whether these projects are good.
The question is whether we let an artist's last chapter be defined by the work they chose to do, or by the machine that keeps selling it after they're gone.
Our take: there's nothing wrong with watching, and nothing wrong with feeling uneasy about it.
Kilmer spent decades playing characters who refused to disappear quietly, so maybe it fits that his own exit refuses to either.
Final Thoughts
The least we can do is watch with our eyes open about why we're watching.