The Amazon-backed AI company Showrunner is attempting to reconstruct the famously-missing 43 minutes of Orson Welles The Magnificent Ambersons as a test case for the machine’s ability to edit, rewrite, and overhaul a movie after it has already been filmed.
Welles’ completed follow-up to Citizen Kane was lost to history after studio executives ignored his notes and burned some footage. This upcoming version of The Magnificent Ambersons isn’t intended for commercial use, and Showrunner did not license the rights from Warner Bros. Discovery. Instead, Showrunner expects to spend two years on the reconstruction, with the goal of creating an agent that can do the whole process in an afternoon.
The appeal to studios is obvious. Did the lead actor get arrested, sued, and canceled? Is a certain subplot wildly unpopular with fans? Would everything be easier for the studio if certain political themes got toned down? The promise of Showrunner is an unprecedented level of studio control that might arrive long before the agents are manufacturing full movies.
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CEO Edward Satachi envisions Showrunner as “the Netflix of AI,” with the ability to create bespoke episodes of TV shows based on a few words of prompts. He told The Hollywood Reporter,“Year by year, the technology is getting closer to prompting entire films with AI. Today, AI can’t sustain a story beyond one short episode” but he added that his company Showrunner is a “step toward a scary, strange future of generative storytelling.”
Every AI company calls their product scary — people who speak fluent Venture Capitalist tell me it translates to “profitable” — but so far the results have been unintentionally funny. The billionaires David Zaslav and James Dolan may have been going for immortality when they had their own faces digitally added to Sphere’s controversial The Wizard of Oz, but the world just laughed. And Will Smith didn’t do himself any favors with that AI-enhanced crowd.
