Orson Welles’ daughter ‘disgusted’ by Amazon-backed AI company’s plan to reconstruct lost film

By Pune Media On Sep 9, 2025

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Beatrice Welles, daughter of the legendary director Orson Welles, has said she is “angry and disgusted” by an AI company’s plans to reconstruct 43 minutes of destroyed footage from his 1942 drama The Magnificent Ambersons.

Showrunner, which has been dubbed the “Netflix of AI,” is backed by Amazon.

They announced last Friday that they plan to use artificial intelligence to reconstruct the footage from Welles’s follow-up to Citizen Kane that was destroyed when studio RKO recut the film and gave it a happier ending.

However, in a post on Instagram Monday, Beatrice Welles wrote: “I’m so angry and disgusted by this I can barely function. Of all the directors they had to pick my father, a man who made only 13 movies. A director the whole of Hollywood then and now turned their back on.

“But when he was alive they couldn’t keep their hands off his work they either took his movies away from him, changed the movie completely, let us not forget Touch of Evil and now? They are doing the same. In addition they refused to give him one penny to make a movie. But they just can’t keep their little fingers off his work. Makes me sick to my stomach.”

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Orson Welles, pictured in 1971, directed ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ as the follow-up to his groundbreaking debut ‘Citizen Kane’ (Getty Images)

The new footage that Showrunner creates won’t be commercialized as they don’t control the rights to the original film, which is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery and Concord. In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, Showrunner CEO Edward Saatchi said that if those companies “see a marketplace for it and a path for it outside of an academic context, then of course they have ownership of it.”

He added: “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?’”

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‘The Magnicent Ambersons’ was cut short by the studio

In the comments on Beatrice Welles’s post, some fans defended the plans. One wrote: “I understand your outrage, Beatrice, but you must understand, this is being done with the intention of attempting to get this material closer to your father’s vision. We can have feelings and arguments about the way they are doing it (and I would agree with you), but it is with the best of intentions.

“You are sounding like this is some kind of violation, but this is being done to right the wrong that was done to your father’s work. I might agree that it shouldn’t be messed with, but to treat it like it is againt your father’s work I think is wrong.”

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