05 Sep Orson Welles’ Lost Movie Will Use AI to Reconstruct Missing 43 Minutes [The Hollywood Reporter]
BY WINSTON CHO
September 5, 2025 | Since the rise of generative artificial intelligence in 2022, the technology has mostly been plugged into parts of the production pipeline as far as its deployment in Hollywood. Think visual effects, dubbing and storyboarding. As it stands, it’s mostly thought of as a tool to streamline certain processes and cut costs.
But others have their sights set on completely overhauling the entertainment industry’s use of AI. At the forefront: Showrunner, which plans to reconstruct the destroyed 43 minutes of Orson Welles‘ The Magnificent Ambersons.
Amazon-backed Showrunnner announced on Friday a new AI model designed to generate long, complex narratives — ultimately building toward feature film length, live action films — for its platform completely dedicated to AI content that allows users to create their own episodes of TV shows with a prompt of just a couple of words. Over the next two years, it’ll be utilized to re-create Welles’ follow-up to Citizen Kane, a chunk of which was lost after studio executives burned the footage.
The endeavor marks the tech’s further encroachment onto Hollywood as it eyes the exploitation of AI tools embroiled in controversy over the possibility they were created using copyrighted materials from creators they could eventually displace. CEO Edward Saatchi ultimately envisions Showrunner as the “Netflix of AI” in which users can interact with and make fan fiction-esque versions of the intellectual property they’re watching.
“Year by year, the technology is getting closer to prompting entire films with AI,” Saatchi says. “Today, AI can’t sustain a story beyond one short episode” but his company’s technology is a “step toward a scary, strange future of generative storytelling.”
The effort won’t be commercialized because Showrunner hasn’t obtained the rights to the film from Warner Bros. Discovery or Concord. If they “see a marketplace for it and a path for it outside of an academic context, then of course they have ownership of it,” Saatchi says. “The goal isn’t to commercialize the 43 minutes, but to see them exist in the world after 80 years of people asking ‘might this have been the best film ever made in its original form?’”