OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is the subject of Luca Guadagnino's 'Artificial' (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images) Where can Luca Guadagnino’s OpenAI movie Artificial go now?
That’s the question that has been whirling around Hollywood since the news broke that Amazon MGM Studios was dropping the feature just months after Amazon entered into a $50 billion investment with Sam Altman’s OpenAI.
The choice was particularly interesting to Hollywood rank-and-file, which, in the era of M&A and private equity investments, is contending with more than a few minefields. This situation is not without its comps (albeit not exact). The Donald Trump movie, The Apprentice, had a difficult time selling out of the Cannes Film Festival. Before that, Warner Bros. unloaded several nearly finished films for tax purposes. We are in an era where completed movies are more easily tossed away than ever before.
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The film is now being shopped to other distributors by CAA Media Finance, with many of the major studios already bowing out of the race. And while it is easy to get conspiratorial with a situation like this — especially at a time when tech companies command an outsized presence not just in entertainment but in our lives and whole corporations seem to serve at the pleasure of the President — it is also worthwhile to look at Artificial within the larger context of the entertainment industry.
Below, film reporters Borys Kit and Mia Galuppo attempt to do just that.
MIA GALUPPO The news broke last week that Amazon would be dropping its movie Artificial. Were you surprised by the announcement?
BORYS KIT I was. But I am sometimes naive when it comes to politics and art in Hollywood. Listen, we are at this stage now where there are too many entanglements between Hollywood and tech companies. And there are a lot of reasons why a movie gets let go by a studio, but never before have the people who make movies been entangled with big tech companies and politics like they are now. We are really starting to see how that will affect what gets made.
MG Amazon’s studios business is a fraction of its larger business. The business needs of big Amazon will always come before the wants and needs of the studio. Amazon’s $50 billion investment in OpenAI came with the news that OpenAI would be using Amazon Web Services infrastructure. Having read a version of the screenplay (no spoilers!), it is a less-than-flattering portrait of Sam Altman, to put it lightly. He is portrayed as sociopathic, to put it not as lightly. And as the excellent New Yorker story from Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz points out, Sam Altman is sensitive about his image. So, Amazon was left with the calculus of risking a $50 billion business relationship for a movie.
BK I sometimes don’t understand why big studios make these kinds of movies. For many of us watching these developments, we see they’re not exactly commercial. And you can certainly say there is a reason to do them for art’s sake, but let’s be clear-eyed: There is a limited commercial aspect to a film like this.
MG How much does the American movie-going population care about a story about the inner workings of OpenAI? A lot of people have used The Social Network as a comp for Artificial, but when that movie came out in 2010, Facebook was still Facebook, not Meta. It wouldn’t acquire Instagram for another two years. Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t yet building bunkers in Hawaii. Now that I think about it, where is that movie?
With Artificial, we are talking about an emerging technology that has become synonymous with environmental degradation and democracy-ending misinformation. And while some people would say that is exactly the reason to make a movie like Artificial, it is not the kind of film that audiences have been clamoring to see in 2026, when Hopecore, a la Project Hail Mary, has been playing well.
BK Since The Social Network, the power balance between Hollywood and tech has shifted in one direction. And I am not saying that Artificial shouldn’t get made, but a movie like Artificial, 20 years ago, would have been an HBO movie. Now, it is a streaming movie. So, as far as theatricality goes, I’m not sure what Amazon thought they were doing with this in the first place.
MG Well, at the time, Amazon was in the Luca Guadagnino business. They worked together on the Zendaya movie Challengers, which did solid numbers at the box office, $96 million worldwide, and then, if Amazon shared numbers, we would probably see that it did more business for Prime Video when it went on streaming. The meme generation alone was something a studio social media marketing team could only dream of. Luca and Amazon MGM re-teamed for the Julia Roberts starrer After the Hunt, which grossed an exceedingly rough $9 million at the global box office on a $70 million-plus budget and wasn’t the awards play Amazon hoped for. Artificial, which Luca came on to after his DC movie Sgt. Rock was indefinitely pushed, was greenlit before After the Hunt came out.
BK Talent really, really loves to work with Luca, so it always makes for a pretty-looking package.
MG In terms of talent, Andrew Garfield, who is playing Altman, is certainly a name. The rest of the cast is filled with up-and-comers like Monica Barbaro and Yura Borisov. Both are recent Oscar nominees! But neither has been theatrically tested. With a lack of big Zendaya-level star power, you have to fall back on story (see: above note about general interest in OpenAI) and your filmmaker. Luca is a draw in New York and Los Angeles, certainly. But can he get audiences to theaters in the way that the purchase price of this film would necessitate? Which brings us to the current question of: Where can this film ultimately land?
BK Several of these big studios were not interested at the script stage. Now, it’s a distressed asset; this movie has to be 100 percent, hitting it out of the park, in order to work. It has to fly on its own artistic merit. From what whispers we have heard, some think the quality isn’t there.
MG Still others have said it is a really great movie. Each potential buyer is coming in with their own mandates and already busy calendars. Even if these studios passed on it at the script stage, they may now see something in it that they hadn’t seen prior. But it either needs to be a commercial play or an awards play — ideally both! The movie is in post and wasn’t supposed to be ready for this fall, anyway. Sony already has its own tech-focused drama with The Social Reckoning. The David Ellison-owned Paramount is not in the business of acquiring politically sensitive anything at this moment. Artificial doesn’t make sense for Disney (even if the company’s own OpenAI deal fell apart in March). Netflix is coming off a Cannes Film Festival, where it bought up quite a few titles with award potential. Now, it’s been reported that A24, Uni’s Focus Features and Netflix are all out, and we have heard about a lack of interest from others like Lionsgate and Warners, so that leaves the smaller outfits.
BK A smaller company that wants to establish a relationship with a filmmaker like Luca could get it. Luca churns out movies on a regular basis. He is not one to sit around and develop a movie for four years.
MG The studio that has expressed real and decisive interest is Mubi. After the disappointment of Die, My Love, another star vehicle from an auteur director that flatlined at theaters, the distributor needs a win. It had a decidedly less busy Cannes this year, heading to the festival with Jane Schoenbrun’s Camp Miasma and picking up Lukas Dhont’s Coward. Mubi could use the positive PR that would come with saving a movie from a darling director after it has been cast aside at the whims of tech oligarchs. After all, it was only a year ago that Mubi was bleeding subscribers because of its investment from Sequoia Capital, which had ties to the Israeli military.
BK Then there is Neon, which has a filmmaker-first reputation and knows how to get audiences into theaters for movies that they didn’t necessarily know they wanted to watch.
MG In addition to the politics of it all, a big bottom line here is that movies like Artificial — mid-budget adult dramas — are difficult to make work within the current economics of Hollywood filmmaking.
BK It’s a wobbly business.
MG Real wobbly.
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