Has everyone given up on ever seeing Don Quixote being released in a proper form?

[tony]

Just wondering.

Let's recap: (from Wikipedia):

"The full surviving footage shot by Welles is split between several different locations. Oja Kodar, Welles's companion in his later years, deposited some material with the Munich Film Museum, but in the course of making Don Quijote de Orson Welles (1992) she had earlier sold much of the footage to the Filmoteca Española in Madrid, whose holdings include around 40 minutes edited and dubbed by Welles. Welles's own editing workprint is held by the Cinémathèque Française in Paris. Additional footage, including the negative, was held by Welles' editor Mauro Bonanni in Italy, and in at least one other private collection.(Bonanni and Kodar battled over the negative for decades. Finally, Corte Suprema di Cassazione, Italy's highest court of appeal, ruled against Bonanni in June 2017. He was forced to surrender the negative to Kodar. (He passed away in 2022.)

Don Quijote de Orson Welles is a 1992 version of Welles's unfinished Don Quixote edited by director Jesús Franco. The full surviving footage shot by Welles is split between several different locations. Oja Kodar, Welles's companion in his later years, deposited some material with the Munich Film Museum, but in the course of making Don Quijote de Orson Welles (1992) she had earlier sold much of the footage to the Filmoteca Española in Madrid, whose holdings include around 40 minutes edited and dubbed by Welles. Welles's own editing workprint is held by the Cinémathèque Française in Paris. Additional footage, including the negative, was held by Welles' editor Mauro Bonanni in Italy, and in at least one other private collection.

In 1990, Spanish producer Patxi Irigoyen and Franco acquired the rights to some of the extant footage of the Don Quixote project. Material was provided to them by numerous sources, including Oja Kodar, the Croatian actress who was Welles's mistress and collaborator in his later years, and Suzanne Cloutier, the Canadian actress who played Desdemona in Welles's film version of Othello. In his will, Welles left Kodar the rights to all his unfinished film projects (including Don Quixote), and she was keen to see it completed. She spent the late 1980s touring Europe in a camper van with her Don Quixote footage and approached several notable directors to complete the project. All of them declined for various reasons - except Franco. Franco seemed a logical choice, as he had worked as Welles's second unit director on Chimes at Midnight.
However, Irigoyen and Franco were unable to obtain the footage with McCormack, which included a scene where Don Quixote destroys a movie screen that is showing a film of knights in battle. This footage, along with all footage featuring Patty McCormack, was held by Italian film editor Mauro Bonanni (who had worked on the film in Rome in 1969), who was engaged in a legal dispute with Kodar over the rights to the film. He refused to allow its incorporation into the Irigoyen-Franco project, although he would later permit some scenes to be shown on Italian television. As a consequence of this litigation between Kodar and Bonanni, Kodar insisted that none of the footage with Patty McCormack should be used.
Irigoyen and Franco faced several problems in putting the Welles footage together. Welles had worked in three different formats — 35mm, 16 mm, and Super 16 mm — which created inconsistent visual quality. The wildly varying storage conditions of this footage had further exacerbated the variable visual quality. The lack of a screenplay also hampered efforts. Welles recorded less than an hour's soundtrack where he read a narration and provided dialogue for the main characters, but the rest of the footage was silent. A new script was created by Franco, and voiceover actors were brought in to fill the silence left by Welles's incomplete work, although their impressions of Welles's narration and Quixote/Sancho Panza voices were far from convincing, especially when intercut with the original recordings.[15] Joseph McBride refers to the soundtrack of Franco's version as "an off-putting melange of dubbed voices. A further controversy was the inclusion by Franco of footage of Welles filming in Spain, taken from a documentary he had made on Spain in the 1960s. Welles had not intended to appear in the film himself, other than in its framing scenes as the narrator, and yet the Irigoyen/Franco film features several scenes with Quixote and Sancho Panza on Spanish streets, with Welles apparently looking on. Additionally, Franco inserts a windmill scene into the film, even though Welles had not filmed one or ever intended to film one - the scene relies on footage of Quixote charging across plains, interspersed with windmill images (which were not filmed by Welles), zooms, and jump cuts."

So: a few years ago I heard that Alexander "Sasha" Welles, Kodar's nephew, (how the heck did he get that name? apprently, he's Oja's sister's son, so why is he called Alexander Welles? Is he Orson and Oja's love child?) is working on the putting together of Don Quixote, and this is the latest info available online (as of December 2025):

"Footage from Orson Welles's unfinished film Don Quixote is currently being cataloged and prepared for a potential official assembly and restoration, with the project's fate resting on the approval of rights holder Oja Kodar. This follows decades of legal battles and a widely panned, unauthorized 1992 version. Footage housed in various U.S. and European archives (including the Filmoteca Española, the Cinémathèque Française, and Cinecittà Studios in Rome) is being cataloged in anticipation of a potential definitive restoration.
Rights and Approval: The main hurdle to a new, official version is securing final approval from Oja Kodar, Welles's long-time companion and the film's rights holder. A significant legal battle over the primary negative material with Welles's former editor, Mauro Bonanni, was resolved in Kodar's favor in 2017. News reports from late 2024 suggest that "things seem to finally be moving" towards a proper release, offering a second, better attempt at completing the film than the previous controversial version."

Might anyone have heard anything more recent than this late 2024 news?

[Wellesnet]

A mess, but has its admirers-
Orson Welles' Don Quixote (1957-1972)
(Jess Franco 1992 assemblage, Remastered in 4K):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_bPoKbtfoA&t=16s