At the 82nd Venice Film Festival, Edward Saatchi’s Showrunner unveiled its most ambitious project to date, a reconstruction of one of cinema’s most famous lost works. Using a new model suite called FILM-1, the San Francisco startup will attempt to recreate the missing 43 minutes of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), a film widely regarded as a ruined masterpiece.
AI Enhanced Keyframe of Final Scene Factory Eugene Morgan Magnificent Ambersons
RKO
The project marks a new chapter for Showrunner, which began life at Fable Studio experimenting with animated, prompt-based episodes and now describes itself as the “Netflix of AI.” Its early demos, including unauthorized South Park episodes, attracted tens of millions of views and highlighted the disruptive potential of generative video. FILM-1 represents an effort to move beyond short animated satire into live-action style storytelling, with Ambersons as its first proving ground.
The choice of Welles is deliberate. After the triumph of Citizen Kane, Welles returned with a period drama about a wealthy Midwestern family undone by arrogance and industrial change. The studio, RKO, found the film too bleak. Executives cut more than 40 minutes, reshot the ending to make it optimistic, and destroyed the excised footage. “If I had been allowed to finish The Magnificent Ambersons as I intended, it would have been a greater picture than Kane,” Welles later said. Even in its truncated form, the film remains celebrated, appearing on Sight & Sound’s critics poll of the greatest films of all time.
AI Enhanced Keyframe of Final Scene at Boarding House Still.
RKO
Reconstruction efforts have long fascinated cinephiles. Over the years, archivists and journalists searched in vain for the missing reels, even traveling to Brazil, where Welles was working at the time of the cuts. For the Venice announcement, Showrunner partnered with Brian Rose, a researcher and filmmaker who has devoted five years to rebuilding the movie from notes, set photographs, and production records. Rose has recreated 30,000 frames, rebuilt physical sets in 3D, and mapped camera moves to match Welles’ documentation. Of the film’s 73 scenes, only 13 survived untouched. “These changes were all made without Welles’s approval,” Rose said. “The few who saw Welles’ original version believed it was the greatest film they had ever seen.”
Showrunner’s task is to take Rose’s meticulous groundwork and extend it with AI. According to the company, FILM-1 will generate keyframes, reconstruct camera trajectories, and use surviving set photographs to rebuild lost spaces. Some sequences will involve live actors, with AI face transfer and pose transfer techniques used to approximate original performances. Voices will be generated in combination with actors delivering live readings.
AI Enhanced Keyframe of Final Scene at Boarding House Magnificent Ambersons.
RKO
Showrunner has also announced that VFX expert Tom Clive, formerly of Metaphysic, a Hollywood VFX startup, will be joinijng the company. Clive will be developing his own film projects as an AI filmmaker as well as contributing to The Magnificent Ambersons. The company Metaphysic has previously worked on face-swapping and de-aging in films like Robert Zemeckis’ Here and Alien Romulus which aligns with the requirements of the reconstruction.
Saatchi insists the project is noncommercial, and an academic and research exercise. The rights to the film rest with Warner Bros. and Concord, which recently acquired RKO. The plan is to present the reconstruction in academic and archival settings around 2027. “The goal isn’t to commercialize the 43 minutes,” Saatchi said. “This is Warner Brothers’ and RKO’s IP – we don’t have any goal of commercializing this – our interest is purely academic and we won’t be releasing this outside of an academic context. The goal is to see those 43 minutes exist in the world after 80 years of people asking whether this might have been the best film ever made in its original form.”
The announcement comes as Hollywood debates the role of AI in production, a subject that has provoked labor strikes and lawsuits. By selecting a revered but mutilated film, Showrunner is attempting to show a constructive use of the technology. Saatchi framed it this way: “People often ask when the Citizen Kane of AI will arrive. Perhaps the Citizen Kane of AI isn’t a VFX-heavy new movie, but a painstaking reconstruction of the holy grail of cinema.”
Welles’ own words echo across the decades. He called the lost final scene between Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead “the best scene I ever shot. The best scene in my life. And it’s gone.” Because of AI, maybe not.