Video of The Magnificent Ambersons Reconstructed - The First Four Minutes

At the 82nd Venice Film Festival, San Francisco-based startup Showrunner unveiled one of the most audacious projects in film history: an attempt to restore Orson Welles' mutilated classic "The Magnificent Ambersons" using artificial intelligence.

The company's new model suite, FILM-1, will reconstruct the 43 minutes cut by RKO from Welles' 1942 film -- a period drama about a wealthy Midwestern family collapsing under the weight of arrogance and industrial progress. Executives at the time deemed the original version too bleak, reshot a more optimistic ending, and destroyed the discarded reels. Welles, who had just made "Citizen Kane", would later claim: "If I had been allowed to finish 'The Magnificent Ambersons' as I intended, it would have been a greater picture than 'Kane'." Even in truncated form, the film remains a staple of Sight & Sound's greatest films of all time poll.

Showrunner, which began as Fable Studio experimenting with AI-generated animation, now calls itself the "Netflix of AI". Its early viral tests included unauthorised South Park episodes. With Ambersons, however, the company is moving into more ambitious territory -- live-action reconstruction that blurs the line between film preservation and AI innovation.

According to the Showrunner, FILM-1 will recreate missing footage by generating keyframes, reconstructing camera trajectories, and rebuilding sets from production stills. Some sequences will feature live actors, with AI-assisted face and pose transfer used to approximate the original performances. Voices will be produced through a hybrid of live readings and AI synthesis.

The project is noncommercial, Showrunner founder Edward Saatchi stressed, and will be presented in academic and archival contexts beginning around 2027. "We have no goal of commercialising these 43 minutes," he said. "This is Warner Bros and RKO's intellectual property. Our aim is purely academic -- to finally allow the world to see what was lost after 80 years of speculation."

The reconstruction builds on the groundwork of film historian Robert L Carringer and other researchers who have painstakingly documented the cuts. Showrunner has also enlisted VFX specialist Tom Clive, formerly of Metaphysic, whose work on de-ageing and face-swapping in films like Robert Zemeckis' Here and Alien: Romulus aligns closely with the demands of the Ambersons project.

The timing is significant. Hollywood is locked in debate over AI's role in production, with unions, studios, and courts weighing in on its implications. By selecting a revered but irreparably damaged film, the Showrunner hopes to argue for a more constructive use of the technology. "People often ask when the 'Citizen Kane' of AI will arrive," Saatchi said. "Perhaps it isn't a new blockbuster at all, but the careful resurrection of cinema's holy grail."

For Welles, the loss was personal. He once described the destroyed final scene between Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead as "the best scene I ever shot. The best scene in my life. And it's gone." Now, with AI, it may not be gone forever.