ElevenLabs said on Wednesday that it has struck a deal with Stan Lee Universe to add Stan Lee’s voice and likeness to its Iconic Marketplace, extending the late comic creator’s image and sound into a set of AI tools that companies can license for commercial use. The rollout starts Wednesday, with users also able to generate Lee’s likeness inside comic-book-inspired templates and use his voice in the Eleven Reader app.
Lee died in 2018, but his name has remained one of the most valuable in pop culture. The new arrangement gives ElevenLabs another celebrity offering alongside voices and likenesses tied to Michael Caine, Judy Garland, Burt Reynolds, David Hasselhoff and Albert Einstein, as the company pushes deeper into a market built around recognizable personalities.
Stan Lee Universe is a joint venture between Genius Brands International and POW! Entertainment, and the deal underscores how celebrity estates are testing the limits of AI licensing. ElevenLabs said the visual generator feature will be limited to non-commercial use, even as the voice and likeness sit inside a marketplace designed for commercial licensing, a split that reflects both the demand for these digital likenesses and the caution surrounding how they are used.
The voice itself was trained on professional recordings of Lee, according to the company. Users will be able to use it to narrate any book through the Eleven Reader app, and ElevenLabs is pairing the launch with a new series called Stan Lee Book Club of the Month, which will feature Lee’s voice narrating a different public-domain title every month. June’s selection is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and the company said it plans to add a new public-domain book each month to honor Lee’s love for reading.
For Lee’s estate and its partners, the project is less about nostalgia than control. Chaz Rainey said Stan always believed in meeting fans where they were, in comics, at conventions or in a quick on-screen cameo, and called the partnership a way of continuing that. He added that fans have long said they hear Lee’s voice when they read his comics, and that ElevenLabs can now make that experience real.
Lori McCreary, meanwhile, said the arrangement points to a broader industry reckoning. She said technology companies and the entertainment business need to work together to build AI systems that respect consent, protect name, image and likeness rights, and preserve the value of human creativity. If that happens, she said, the result will not just be keeping pace with technology but helping shape it.
The next test is whether this kind of licensing becomes a model or a warning. The deal puts Stan Lee inside one of the most visible AI voice marketplaces just as estates, studios and tech companies are still deciding how much of a dead performer can be recreated, who gets paid and who decides where the line is drawn.
