Finding Jack hasn’t been made yet, but it sounds like the fifth movie you’d watch on the return leg of a long haul flight. Its premise – an injured soldier in Vietnam becomes best friends with a labrador – suggests an onslaught of greasy sentimentality sickly enough to give you gastroenteritis. There is no way on earth you’d pay to see Finding Jack.

Or maybe there is. What if we amended Finding Jack’s premise to “an injured soldier in Vietnam becomes best friends with a labrador, plus James Dean stars from beyond the grave as a crime against God”? Of course you’d watch that. You’d watch it just to see if it was as distressing as it sounds.

The film-makers would be better served by digging up James Dean’s body, dressing it in an army uniform and jerking it about on wires

Luckily, it’s happening. Yesterday, the Hollywood Reporter announced that the family of James Dean have given permission to allow their iconic ancestor to be digitally resurrected for a secondary lead role in Finding Jack. “The family views this as his fourth movie, a movie he never got to make,” said film-maker Anton Ernst in a statement. “We do not intend to let his fans down.”

What great news! They’re taking the likeness of a long-dead actor and feeding it into a technology largely known for producing creepy, waxy, lifeless monstrosities so that it can lumber through a terrible, legacy-destroying film while an impressionist makes it perform dialogue about how nice dogs are. Realistically, the film-makers would be better served by digging up James Dean’s body, dressing it in an army uniform and jerking it about on wires. But, hey, at least they don’t intend to let his fans down.

This has been coming for a long time. Those old arch enemies Marvel and Martin Scorsese have both found potential in digital de-ageing, even though – given Robert De Niro’s upsetting Polar Express eyes in The Irishman, Samuel L Jackson’s weirdly exhausted-looking Nick Fury in Captain Marvel and that one shot of Michael Douglas looking like he was melting in Avengers: Endgame – the process has clearly yet to be perfected. And while Star Wars brought Peter Cushing back from the dead for Rogue One, the end result was distracting at best and the actual stuff of nightmares at worst.

And Cushing was playing a character that he’d already played before, so at least there was a modicum of artistic leeway there. James Dean, meanwhile – who died before the Vietnam war began – will be playing a role in a film he has absolutely no relationship with.

The bad news is that CMG Worldwide, which own the rights to Dean’s likeness, sees this as a gateway to bring back some of its other dead clients. If Finding Jack is a success, it paves the way for a rash of films starring nightmarish digital versions of Aaliyah or Jack Lemmon or Maya Angelou.

The good news is that Finding Jack is never going to be made. Never ever. Look at it this way: nobody wanted to make The Irishman because the technology was too expensive. And that’s a film by the world’s greatest living director starring the world’s two most celebrated actors. It’s the closest you will ever find to a sure thing, and it still almost didn’t happen.

Meanwhile, Finding Jack’s directors are listed as Anton Ernst and Tati Golykh, two people who have never directed a feature film of any description, even with actors who are all alive. Ernst is best known for producing a 2004 Jean-Claude Van Damme film called Wake of Death, and one of Golykh’s IMDb photos is of her shooting a gun in a bra. It is never going to happen. Nobody in their right mind would ever finance such a risk. I’ll eat my hat if it ever sees the light of day.

Still, at least this is a sign that the days of Hollywood getting a James Dean type by hiring James Franco are over. It might be morally bankrupt, but at least it isn’t stupid.

