The Ending of Orson Welles's Lost Film to Be Restored with AI

The American company Fable, founded by the producer Edward Saatchi, is using generative artificial intelligence to restore the lost 43 minutes of Orson Welles's film «The Magnificent Ambersons».

Edward Saatchi belongs to the family that founded the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. His company has received investment from Amazon and was formerly called Showrunner.

Welles made «The Magnificent Ambersons» in 1941 at RKO, immediately after «Citizen Kane». The director had surrendered the right to the final cut. In early 1942 Welles left for Brazil to shoot a documentary commissioned by the US government as part of the «Good Neighbor policy» towards the countries of Latin America. After a disastrous preview screening, the studio cut the film from 131 minutes to 88. The editor Robert Wise, on the studio's instructions, removed the last third of the film, and the studio shot a new, more cheerful ending. Welles had not consented to these changes. The studio later destroyed the excised footage to free up space in its vaults. Welles considered his version of «The Ambersons» far better than «Citizen Kane», and film historians count it among the greatest lost films.

Fable announced the project in September 2025. The company films living actors, then uses AI to overlay the faces of the original film's cast and to generate their voices. The creators are working from the screenplay by Welles and Joseph Cotten, while photographs taken during the shooting of the lost scenes help to recreate the space of the sets. The company is using the film to develop a new model, FILM-1, which is meant to learn to create realistic feature films. Saatchi called the lost version «the holy grail of lost cinema». The rights to the film belong to Warner Bros., so Fable does not intend to sell the result and describes the project as non-commercial and academic.

The project has drawn objections. The director's daughter Beatrice Welles, who manages his legacy, stated that nobody had told her of Fable's plans. She said that, like most people, she is afraid of artificial intelligence, and added that where «The Ambersons» is concerned she is a purist and would have preferred that no one had meddled with the film from the very start. A purist is a person who strictly defends the inviolability and purity of a work. Since 1 January 2026 California has had a law requiring the consent of heirs for the creation of digital copies of deceased actors with the help of AI. Whether Fable has obtained such consent is not publicly known.