Amazon spent a year developing a film about Sam Altman. Then it invested $50 billion in his company. Now it no longer wants to release the film.
That is the essence of an unusual studio retreat. Amazon MGM Studios has dropped "Artificial," Luca Guadagnino's nearly finished, roughly $40 million biopic starring Andrew Garfield as the OpenAI chief executive, and will instead shop it to rival studios. According to Variety, the film was already being screened for other buyers on Thursday. Amazon's official explanation makes no mention of the $50 billion partnership it struck with OpenAI in February, a deal that deepened the company's reliance on Amazon Web Services and followed an earlier $38 billion cloud contract between the two firms.
Amazon's exit says everything by leaving the deal unsaid
Amazon's statement reads less like a withdrawal than a tribute, calling Guadagnino an "award-winning filmmaker" and suggesting the film would be "better served if it were released by a different studio." The reasoning beneath the courtesy is not difficult to infer.
What complicates the framing is that Amazon knew precisely what it had commissioned. The studio greenlit the film last year, fast-tracked it, and had reviewed every iteration of Simon Rich's script before Guadagnino joined the project, putting some $40 million behind a story it understood from the start. The decision was not driven by a disappointing result, either. Variety reports the test screenings were received very positively. The film works, which may be the real difficulty.
Too unflattering to release, too finished to ignore
"Artificial" dramatizes the week in 2023 when OpenAI's board fired Altman and then reinstated him days later. Described as a "Social Network" for the AI age and shot in San Francisco and Italy, the film reportedly portrays Altman and Elon Musk as its least sympathetic figures, the characters audiences are meant to dislike, according to an insider who has seen it. That is a difficult film to release once you have become one of OpenAI's largest financial backers.
Few films assemble a cast this deep without an awards run in mind. Garfield leads, supported by Monica Barbaro as former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Yura Borisov as co-founder Ilya Sutskever and Ike Barinholtz as Musk, alongside Mark Rylance, Jason Schwartzman and Billie Lourd. The film had been circling an awards-qualifying run over Christmas before a wider release in early 2027. Puck first reported Amazon's exit, and discussions about the film's next home are ongoing.
The question now is which studio will distribute an unflattering portrait of the most powerful figure in artificial intelligence, and the stakes for Altman are not abstract. "The Social Network" was also a Garfield film, and its version of Mark Zuckerberg defined how the public saw him for years. A similar origin story is precisely what Altman risks inheriting from "Artificial," which makes the question of who releases it more than a matter of logistics.
Altman and Amazon chief Jeff Bezos are known to be friendly; Altman attended Bezos' Venice wedding last year. So when a studio that just put $50 billion into OpenAI walks away from a $40 million film it has all but finished, it is not hard to see what is really being said.
