Celebrity Spirits Had a Good Run. Now the Only Celebrities Getting New Deals Are Dead Ones.
The math that made George Clooney’s Casamigos Tequila worth a billion dollars to Diageo in 2017 doesn’t work anymore. Casamigos sales fell 18 percent in 2025. Clooney has moved on to non-alcoholic beer. Conor McGregor was dropped as the face of Proper No. Twelve Irish Whiskey. The living-celebrity spirits pipeline, once capable of turning any recognizable name into a liquor brand overnight, has largely dried up — this year’s most notable new entrant was a Tequila from a mid-tier comedian.
But one category of celebrity spirits deal is still getting made: the kind where the celebrity has been dead for decades.
Lasso Motel Whiskey partnered with the James Dean estate on a 13-Year Rye, with the age statement tied to the racing number on the Porsche Dean died in and a label palette pulled from his “Rebel Without a Cause” wardrobe. MGP’s Remus Bourbon line has released tribute bottlings for Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, each engineered around the players’ jersey numbers and career statistics — the Ruth release ran 10,624 bottles, one for every plate appearance of his career, with a QR code linking each bottle to that specific at-bat. Grain & Barrel’s Elvis Whiskey line is still going strong five years in, and Duke Spirits has built a growing portfolio around John Wayne.
The appeal is structural, not sentimental. A dead celebrity’s biography is finished, which means there’s no risk of a scandal surfacing mid-campaign and taking the brand down with it — a lesson the industry has learned the hard way from McGregor, Diddy, and others. The story is fixed, the marketing budget goes toward production value instead of crisis management, and the audience — baseball fans, classic Hollywood devotees, longtime Elvis loyalists — already exists and doesn’t need to be built from scratch.
Living celebrities offered spirits brands instant recognition. Dead ones are turning out to offer something more durable: an endorsement that can’t turn into a liability.
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