Is AI-Restoring Orson Welles or the Wizard of Oz a Good Idea?
An AI-generated shot of Anne Baxter as Lucy Morgan from the new version of 'The Magnificent Ambersons' being undertaken by Fable Studios. The AI company says it will restore and change the Orson Welles classic to conform with the director's original hopes, delighting some fans and angering others.
Fable Studios
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In 1986, The New York Times ran a screed against a film-restoration trend gaining steam.
Published in the thick of the “colorization” craze of the 1980s, the late critic Vincent Canby argued that the process of altering black-and-white movies with modern visual flourishes “desecrated” those classics, writing that “nobody connected with the original[s]…had anything to do with this artistic revisionism” and “of the half-dozen [colorized] films I’ve seen to date, all but one were virtually unwatchable.” The problems in Canby’s view were both ethical and aesthetic, ultimately betraying that key quality of any artwork — that it belongs to the time in which it was made.
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Forty years later, Canby’s impassioned argument fits rather neatly into a raging debate around a new technological movement: The use of Generative Artificial Intelligence to expand upon, alter or simply “complete” movies that were made decades before. The Sphere in Las Vegas thrust the practice into the mainstream with its AI-ified take on 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, which employed various techniques to fill the space’s 160,000-square-foot interior display plane. Echoing that 40-year-old Canby editorial, today’s Times’ critic Alissa Wilkinson wrote, “It suggests that in the future, every artist’s choices could be reversed, altered or ripped to shreds, then presented by their corporate owners as if they’re essentially the original, just zhuzhed up a bit for a new century.”
Colorization died a relatively quick death, at least as a formally accepted practice; its short lifespan serves as a reminder that backlash to innovations can be both warranted and effective. AI, though, might yield a more complex story.
“In moving-image history, these debates about technological change and its impact on creativity or labor or our understanding of the past have resurfaced at various times,” says Dr. Charles Acland, a distinguished professor of cultural theory and film studies at Concordia University. “But we also live in an economy where there is such extraordinary hype around what gets called AI…that it puts a different kind of pressure on these discussions and debates. Colorization is a good comparison, but it didn’t have the same sweeping social and economic impact of something like generative AI — so there’s more at stake in how we sort through what we’re going to accept and valorize.”
Since its August 2025 opening, The Sphere’s Oz has sold more than 2.2 million tickets, a staggering number for what remains, even for all its enhancements, a live and edited presentation of a widely available film first released nearly 90 years ago. If critics and cinephiles were split on, even largely repelled by, The Sphere’s digital addition of new Oz performances and visuals, the general public embraced an immersive, eventized version of the classic movie.
And with that, more is on the way. The AI-restoration wave may only be starting to crest.
Edward Saatchi, founder of Fable Studios, is currently spearheading an elaborate project on The Magnificent Ambersons. The only existing version of the 1942 Orson Welles family drama was famously cut down and re-shot by RKO against the director’s wishes, with more than an hour of unseen footage eventually destroyed. Welles himself spoke decades later of his desire to reshoot the original ending — RKO’s version was decidedly sunnier — and revive the dismantled final act. Admirers have since brainstormed doing that on his behalf. Welles’s Ambersons cut is considered among the great lost films, though its existing form is still itself revered.
The trail of evidence that Welles left behind has kept the notion of restoration alive. From the set photos and the “cutting continuity,” a document describing how each shot leads into the next, to the director’s own comments over the years, one could at least imagine the Ambersons that never saw the light of day. With this evidenc