On June 19th, Amazon MGM Studios dropped “Artificial,” Luca Guadagnino’s film about Sam Altman, from its release slate, even though Amazon had green-lit the movie and principal photography was complete. The film had cost a reported forty million dollars. A few months earlier, in late February, Amazon had signed a broad multiyear partnership with OpenAI that included a fifty-billion-dollar investment. In a statement, the studio said only that the film would be better served by a different studio.
This is not a review. “Artificial” opens on Christmas Day, and the early notices from its New York Film Festival premiere, earlier this month, range from rapturous to unconvinced. It is an essay about how the film got here, and what that journey says about a culture in which the companies building artificial intelligence are becoming large enough to own the means of telling their own story.
The film dramatizes the five days in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Altman and then, facing a staff revolt, brought him back. Andrew Garfield plays Altman; Yura Borisov plays Ilya Sutskever, the co-founder who helped remove him. The script is by Simon Rich. At the time, the episode looked like a governance crisis at an ambitious startup. In retrospect, it was the week a nonprofit’s board tested whether it could restrain its chief executive, and learned that it could not.
The obvious reading of Amazon’s decision is that a company with fifty billion dollars invested in OpenAI did not want to distribute an unflattering portrait of OpenAI’s chief. It may be the right reading. But it is not the only one, and the reporting points in several directions. According to Screen International, the head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, Mike Hopkins, reportedly felt the film had turned out darker than he had expected. Guadagnino’s previous film for Amazon, “After the Hunt,” also starring Garfield, had reportedly been a costly commercial failure. Studios drop finished films for reasons of budget, tone, and strategy all the time. Amazon, for its part, said it had the utmost respect for Guadagnino and hoped to keep working with him.
Even Garfield has been careful. Asked about the decision, he said that some things fit certain places and not others, and that Amazon had been supportive throughout the production.
What is not ambiguous is the structure. Whatever went through anyone’s mind at Amazon, the company that owned the studio had an enormous financial stake in the company depicted in the film. That conflict does not require bad faith to matter. It requires only that the people deciding whether a film gets released have reasons, conscious or not, to prefer that it not be. Guadagnino, asked about the matter on Italian television, declined to say much, but recalled that CBS had cancelled a miniseries about the Reagans in 2003 after political pressure. The analogy is imperfect, and perhaps more unsettling for that reason. In 2003, the pressure came from outside the network. Today, it can be built into the balance sheet.
Finding another buyer proved difficult. After potential deals with Netflix, Focus Features, and A24 fell through, Neon announced on June 30th that it had acquired worldwide rights. Neon declined to disclose what it paid. It is worth being clear about Neon’s motives, too: the distributor of “Parasite” and “Anora” bought the film to compete for Oscars, which is a commercial calculation, not an act of courage. But it was a calculation several larger companies chose not to make.
Altman’s own response has been more measured than the headlines suggested. At OpenAI’s DevDay, on September 29th, he said the trailer looked like an awful movie, but added that he appreciated people’s creativity. He also acknowledged that public anxiety about AI might find an outlet in how the film portrays him. In a separate interview, he said he doubted the filmmakers were aiming for accuracy, and described walking past the production on his street and waving at Garfield, who had said in August that he had never met him.
Altman’s doubts about accuracy deserve to be taken seriously. Films about living executives compress events, invent dialogue, and assign motives no one can verify. “The Social Network,” in which Garfield played Facebook’s co-founder Eduardo Saverin, shaped public perceptions of Mark Zuckerberg more than any profile, and it was not a documentary. “Artificial” will arrive with the same license, and viewers should grant it the same skepticism.
Those two concerns pull against each other, and the tension is the point. A film may be unfair to the man it depicts. That is an argument for criticism, rebuttal, and the long work of reporting. It is not an argument for the film never being seen, and certainly not for that decision resting with companies whose fortunes depend on the man in the picture. “Artificial” made it to theaters. The next film about the industry may face the same arithmetic, and the people doing the math will not have to explain themselves.