{"id":5086,"date":"2025-09-09T15:14:20","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T15:14:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/orson-welles-estate-disgusted-amazon-ai-remake\/"},"modified":"2025-09-09T15:14:20","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T15:14:20","slug":"orson-welles-estate-disgusted-amazon-ai-remake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/orson-welles-estate-disgusted-amazon-ai-remake\/","title":{"rendered":"Orson Welles’ Estate Disgusted by Amazon Remaking His Movie Using AI"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The estate for the late director Orson Welles is furious that Amazon and is going to use AI to \"bring back to life\" his lost masterpiece.<\/div>\n

Amazon is planning to use artificial intelligence to recreate destroyed footage<\/a> from Orson Welles’ 1942 film “The Magnificent Ambersons” \u2014 but the late directors’ estate is calling bull.<\/p>\n

In a statement to\u00a0Variety<\/em><\/a>, a spokesperson for David Reeder, whose Reeder Brand Management handles Welles’ estate on behalf of the auteur’s daughter Beatrice, said that the family hadn’t been informed of the project, which is slated to generate with AI the final 43 minutes of the film.<\/p>\n

Edward Saatchi, the CEO of the Showrunner AI video app that Amazon recently invested in<\/a>, told CNBC<\/em>‘s “Squawk Box<\/a>” last week that he and indie filmmaker Brian Rose<\/a> want to resurrect that “lost” footage from Welles “ruined masterpiece” and bring the film “back to life.”<\/p>\n

They plan to do so by shooting sequences with live actors and then face-swapping their likenesses with AI recreations of the movie’s original cast. Helmed by web dev-turned-VFX maestro<\/a> Tom Clive, it sounds like the “Ambersons” effects will constitute an updated version of the kind of movie magic that’s been used for everything from the inclusion of Richard Nixon<\/a> and other historic figures in Forrest Gump more than 30 years ago to the posthumous CGI additions of actors Peter Cushing in 2016’s “Rogue One” \u2014 which spawned a lengthy court battle<\/a> with Disney \u2014 and Carrie Fisher in “The Rise of Skywalker<\/a>” in 2019.<\/p>\n

To call “Ambersons” a lost masterpiece isn’t exactly an overstatement. Welles’ film adaptation of a 1918 Pulitzer-winning novel<\/a> of the same name by author Booth Tarkington takes on societal change around the early 20th century \u2014 but his raw cut was significantly modified by Golden Age studio RKO<\/a>, removing nearly an hour of footage and changing the ending to a happier one.<\/p>\n

Though the directors’ notes for the original ending survived, the studio burned the raw footage it had removed, leaving Welles’ vision for the film slashed and his heart broken.<\/p>\n

“They destroyed ‘Ambersons,'” the director famously lamented, “and it destroyed me.”<\/p>\n

Though\u00a0there are rumors of a copy floating around somewhere in Brazil<\/a>, it does not appear that Showrunner, the “Netflix of AI<\/a>,” has procured it. As such, this AI-generated resurrection is far from what Welles’ family \u2014 which collaborated earlier this year with the AI storytelling app Storyrabbit<\/a> to allow it to use his famous baritone as a narrator \u2014 wants to happen.<\/p>\n

“In general, the estate has embraced AI technology to create a voice model intended to be used for [voiceover] work with brands,” the estate told\u00a0Variety<\/em> through a spokesperson. “That said, this attempt to generate publicity on the back of Welles’ creative genius is disappointing, especially as we weren\u2019t even given the courtesy of a heads up.”<\/p>\n

“While AI is inevitable, it still cannot replace the creative instincts resident in the human mind,” the Welles estate continued, “which means this effort to make ‘Ambersons’ whole will be a purely mechanical exercise without any of the uniquely innovative thinking or a creative force like Welles.”<\/p>\n

On the scale of celebrity AI resurrections, which range from some podcasters’ gruesome and unauthorized use<\/a> of George Carlin’s voice for a “comedy special” last year to Rod Stewart’s creepy selfie homage<\/a>\u00a0to the recently-passed Ozzy Osbourne, this one probably isn’t the worst.<\/p>\n

Still, it’s a shame to see an AI company treat the estate of a beloved director so inconsiderately \u2014 especially because,\u00a0given their deal with Storyrabbit,\u00a0the Welles family isn’t even opposed to the technology in the first place.<\/p>\n

More on AI and entertainment: <\/strong>In Further Assault on Cinema, Amazon Is Deploying AI-Aided Dubs on Streaming Movies<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The post Orson Welles’ Estate Disgusted by Amazon Remaking His Movie Using AI<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Amazon is planning to use artificial intelligence to recreate destroyed footage from Orson Welles’ 1942 film “The Magnificent Ambersons” \u2014 but the late directors’ estate is calling bull. In a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,530,857,177,3213],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai-video","category-ai-voice","category-amazon","category-artificial-intelligence","category-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5086"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5086\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}