Amazon-Backed AI Firm Experiments With Orson Welles-Inspired Fan Fiction
On Friday, AI startup Fable unveiled an ambitious and unusual plan: to digitally reconstruct the missing 43 minutes of Orson Welles’ 1942 classic The Magnificent Ambersons.
Fable, which bills itself as the “Netflix of AI” and counts Amazon’s Alexa Fund among its investors, has built a platform that lets users create cartoons through AI prompts. While the company is starting with its own original IP, it eventually hopes to expand into Hollywood properties — it has already demonstrated its tech by producing unauthorized South Park episodes.
The new project will rely on Fable’s narrative-focused AI model, designed to generate long, complex storylines. Over the next two years, filmmaker Brian Rose — who has spent the past five years researching and digitally reconstructing Welles’ vision — plans to use the model to “resurrect” the missing Ambersons sequences.
There’s just one problem: Fable does not own the rights to the film. That means the project is less a legitimate restoration than a tech demo, unlikely to ever reach the public.
Although overshadowed by Welles’ debut Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons is regarded as a “lost masterpiece.” Studio executives notoriously recut the film, slashing nearly an hour of footage and tacking on a false happy ending. That sense of “what might have been” is what seems to fascinate both Rose and Fable.
Still, the project has already drawn criticism. David Reeder, who represents Welles’ daughter Beatrice, called it “a purely mechanical exercise” exploiting Welles’ genius without his estate’s input. He noted they weren’t even given the “courtesy of a heads up,” despite the estate’s own interest in AI (including a Welles-inspired voice model for commercial work).
Rose insists his motivation is to honor Welles’ artistry, pointing to a famously lost four-minute tracking shot that he calls a tragedy. Yet even if Fable and Rose can convincingly reassemble scenes with AI and face-swapping technology, the results will inevitably be imitations, not Welles’ originals.
As with past attempts to complete Welles’ unfinished works, this new effort raises the question of authenticity. Unlike reconstructions from actual Welles footage, Fable’s Ambersons would be a hybrid creation: part AI, part reshoot, part digital replica.
And that means one thing: unless the original reels miraculously resurface, Welles’ true Ambersons remains lost forever.
