Stan Lee Speaks Again Seven Years After His Death: AI Takes the Lead
In recent days, ElevenLabs signed an agreement with Stan Lee Universe to bring the voice and likeness of Stan Lee to its platform, seven years after the death of the co-creator of Marvel comics. The voice enters the Iconic Marketplace for commercial licenses and in the Eleven Reader app, where it can narrate any book; the image will be included in the Creative Templates, the company’s visual content generator.
Since opening the Iconic Marketplace in November 2025, ElevenLabs has been building a catalog of voices licensed from both living and deceased celebrities, including names like Michael Caine, Judy Garland, John Wayne, and Liza Minnelli, alongside historical figures like Mark Twain and Alan Turing. Lee is the newest addition to this collection, and the agreement follows a path already charted in 2022, when Stan Lee Universe granted Marvel a 20-year contract for his name, voice, and image for films, series, and Disney parks.
The commercial push behind this strategy is considerable: in February 2026, the company closed a Series D round of $500 million led by Sequoia, valuing it at $11 billion, more than triple that of a year prior, with $330 million in annual recurring revenue projected by the end of 2025.
A Book Club Narrated by a Synthetic Voice
The heart of the agreement lies in the Stan Lee Book of the Month Club, within the Eleven Reader app. Every month the company will publish a classic public domain book narrated with Lee's reconstructed voice, starting with "Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson in June, with a commitment to add one title each month for the next 12 months. The choice of public domain works is practical: it avoids the complexity of licensing on books still protected and gives ElevenLabs a recurring content program connected to a recognizable name. Users can still select Lee's voice to narrate any title available in the library, in addition to the monthly selections.
On the visual front, Lee’s likeness will appear in the Creative Templates, where, for a limited time, users will be able to generate images and videos depicting him in the spirit of the cameos that have accompanied decades of Marvel films. Personal, non-commercial use is free and regulated by safety guidelines approved by both parties; commercial use of the image, however, must go through the Stan Lee Universe team. The offering is completed with two musical filters, Superhero Swells and Retro Hero Fanfare, available to all users without further permissions.
In presenting the agreement, Chaz Rainey from Stan Lee Universe described it as a continuation of how Lee met fans, between the pages of a comic book, at conventions, or in a quick cameo on screen.
The Consent Model and Its Limitations
The agreement follows the consent licensing framework that ElevenLabs has built around the Iconic Marketplace: the company acts as an intermediary between those who want to use a voice and those who hold the rights, managing licensing agreements and synthesis, while allowing heirs and rights holders to control its use. It presents itself as the legitimate alternative to an already ongoing phenomenon—generative AI tracks appearing on streaming pages of deceased artists without the go-ahead from heirs or labels and unauthorized vocal clones circulating freely.
A statement collected by Variety came from producer Lori McCreary, co-founder with Morgan Freeman of Revelations: the entertainment industry and tech companies, she contended, need to collaborate to build AI systems that respect consent and rights regarding name and image.
The idea of restoring a voice to those who are no longer here is not new, nor is the reconstruction of the voice of a deceased performer, which we have already discussed in relation to video game dubbings and the debate it has sparked among industry professionals. What changes here is the commercial scope and the framework of licenses surrounding a figure of this significance.
What ElevenLabs and Stan Lee Universe have built is the most rigorous version of digital resurrection attempted so far for a pop culture figure of this caliber: defined rights, company intermediation, traceable licenses. However, consent stops at those who hold those rights. Lee cannot approve what his synthetic voice will say, and the authorization of rights holders does not equate to that of the individual. It is the gap that no licensing agreement has filled so far.