Showrunner is attempting something unprecedented in film history: using generative AI to recreate 43 minutes of lost footage from Orson Welles' masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons. The startup's FILM-1 model aims to restore what many consider could have been the greatest film ever made, after RKO Studios destroyed the original negatives 80 years ago.
Showrunner, the AI startup that previously made headlines generating unauthorized South Park episodes, just dropped its most ambitious project yet. The company announced Friday it's using generative AI to recreate 43 minutes of lost footage from Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, potentially solving one of cinema's greatest mysteries.
The 1942 film represents Hollywood's most notorious case of studio interference. Welles originally crafted a 131-minute masterpiece about a wealthy family's decline during America's industrial revolution. But RKO Studios, frustrated with the director's perfectionism, slashed it to 88 minutes without his consent while he was editing The Lady from Shanghai. The studio's version earned four Oscar nominations, but Welles disowned it entirely. "They destroyed Ambersons and it destroyed me," he reportedly said.
What makes this particularly tragic is that RKO eventually destroyed the original negatives for storage space, erasing Welles' vision forever. Until now. Showrunner co-founder Edward Saatchi believes his company's FILM-1 model can bridge that 80-year gap. "We're getting closer to prompting entire films with AI," Saatchi told The Hollywood Reporter, though he admits current AI "can't sustain a story beyond one short episode."
The technical approach combines cutting-edge AI with traditional filmmaking techniques. Showrunner's FILM-1 model generates keyframes for missing scenes based on Welles' detailed shooting notes and surviving set photographs. The company then uses live actors whose faces are digitally replaced with AI-generated versions of the original cast members. Tom Clive, the AI VFX artist behind recent Hollywood hits Alien: Romulus and Here, leads the face-swapping work after joining from Metaphysic.
Showrunner isn't the first to attempt an Ambersons restoration. Filmmaker Brian Rose spent years creating hand-drawn animation reconstructing lost scenes based on the shooting script and archival photos. Speaking to , Rose described the challenge of populating scenes with characters as one of his biggest hurdles. He also worried about legal repercussions since owns the IP rights, admitting his strategy was to "beg forgiveness later."
