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 recreate 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?’”

The Magnificent Ambersons was filmed in 1941 at RKO’s Gower Street Studios, now Sunset Gower Studios, in Los Angeles. The original cut was 131 minutes long, but Welles had conceded the right to the final cut. And once RKO took over editing, it deleted almost a third of the negatives for the film without the director’s approval to free vault space. That footage was never found.

At the time, the film was screened for critics and The Hollywood Reporter‘s review in July 1942 hailed the feature as “a screen offering of magnificent artistic merits,” noting that the 87-minute cut “is far from easy to summarize in ordinary catchline phrases.” For RKO, “Orson Welles is worth his weight in gold,” the paper said.

Showrunner’s endeavor will deploy a fusion of AI and traditional film techniques to reconstruct the lost footage. This includes shooting some sequences with live actors, with plans to use face and pose transfer techniques with AI tools to preserve the likenesses of the original actors in the movie. Extensively archived set photos from the film will serve as the foundation for recreating the scenes.

Helping to spearhead the project is Brian Rose, a filmmaker who’s spent the last five years recreating 30,000 missing frames from the movie. He’s rebuilt the physical sets in 3D models, using them to pinpoint camera movements to match with the script, set photos, and archive materials. By his thinking, he’s reconstructed the framing and timing of each scene, which will serve as the foundation for the recreation.

“There was for example a four-minute-long, unbroken moving camera shot whose loss is a tragedy,” Rose said in a statement. “The camera moves from one end of a ballroom and then back up the other end [while] you have about a dozen different characters walk in and out of frame, and crisscrossing subplots. It was really ahead of its time. Yet all but about the last 50 seconds of the shot was cut.”

Tom Clive, a VFX expert on faceswapping and de-aging who previously worked for Metaphysic and recently joined Showrunner, will also be assisting.