Amazon-backed AI platform plans to restore 43 minutes of lost Orson Welles footage

Showrunner, an Amazon-backed AI platform that calls itself the “Netflix of AI,” plans to use artificial intelligence to reconstruct 43 minutes of lost footage from Orson Welles’ 1942 film “The Magnificent Ambersons.” The project aims to restore what many consider a “ruined masterpiece” after studio executives cut nearly an hour from Welles’ original vision, representing one of cinema’s most famous cases of studio interference.

The big picture: This represents a new frontier in AI’s application to film restoration, where technology could potentially recover lost artistic works rather than just creating new content from scratch.

What you should know: “The Magnificent Ambersons” was drastically altered by RKO Pictures executives who removed Welles from the editing room and cut his 132-minute film down to 88 minutes.

• The studio deleted an hour of footage, changed the ending to be more upbeat, and released the shortened version in July 1942.
• Welles famously said of the experience: “They destroyed ‘Ambersons,’ and it destroyed me.”
• The lost footage has achieved mythic status among film enthusiasts, with director William Friedkin calling Welles’ intended version the “Holy Grail of cinema.”

How it works: Showrunner is collaborating with filmmaker Brian Rose, who has spent five years digitally rebuilding sets based on approximately 30,000 missing frames from the original film.

• Rose has been working to reconstruct elaborate sequences, including a four-minute unbroken camera shot through a ballroom with multiple characters and intersecting plotlines.
• “The camera moves from one end of a ballroom and then back up the other end [while] you have about a dozen different characters walk in and out of frame, and crisscrossing subplots,” Rose explained.
• Only the final 50 seconds of this technically ambitious sequence survived the studio cuts.

What they’re saying: CEO Edward Saatchi positions the project as exploring AI’s creative potential beyond traditional entertainment production.

• “I think that what’s coming is a world where we’re not the only creative species, and that we will enjoy entertainment created by AIs,” Saatchi told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
• “We wanted to try our AI on the greatest storyteller of the last 200 years: Orson Welles.”

Industry skepticism: The announcement has generated mixed reactions on social media, with some film critics expressing concern about AI’s limitations.

• Film critic Sean Burns posted on X: “Can’t wait to see what Joseph Cotten looks like with six fingers!” referencing common AI glitches that add extra limbs to human figures.
• The project joins other AI film experiments, including an AI-altered version of “The Wizard of Oz” currently displayed at the Sphere in Las Vegas, which has drawn both curiosity and criticism from film purists.

Important limitations: Showrunner’s “Ambersons” reconstruction will remain a “strictly academic noncommercial project” since the company doesn’t own the film rights.

• Warner Bros. Discovery currently holds the rights to “The Magnificent Ambersons” as part of the RKO library.
• This constraint limits the project’s commercial potential while allowing for experimental restoration work.

Historical context: The original film adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel ironically centers on technological disruption, chronicling an affluent Midwestern family’s decline during America’s automotive boom—making the AI restoration effort particularly fitting thematically.