Amazon MGM Studios has dropped “Artificial,” Luca Guadagnino’s nearly-finished film about the 2023 firing and rehiring of Sam Altman, roughly two months after Amazon committed $50 billion to OpenAI as part of what the companies called a “multi-year strategic partnership.” The decision, first reported by Puck, was relayed to Guadagnino’s team by Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios chief Mike Hopkins.

The timing isn’t subtle. Test screenings had reportedly gone well, and an insider who’d seen the cut told Variety that the Altman and Musk characters were the least sympathetic figures on screen, the ones audiences would “like the least.” That’s, presumably, not the read Amazon Web Services wants attached to its newest $50 billion counterparty.

In its statement, the studio kept the register corporate: “We have the utmost respect and admiration for Luca Guadagnino as an award-winning filmmaker… We believe that Artificial will be better served if it were released by a different studio and are working closely with the filmmaking team to find the film a new home.”

The film, written by SNL alum Simon Rich, casts Andrew Garfield as Altman, Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati, Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, with Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Cooper Koch, Billie Lourd, Zosia Mamet, Angus Imrie, Chris O’Dowd and Mark Rylance filling out the ensemble. The Hollywood Reporter has compared its shape to “The Social Network.” It would’ve been Guadagnino’s third Amazon MGM collaboration after “Challengers” in 2024 and “After the Hunt.”

A new home isn’t materializing easily. The Hollywood Reporter says Netflix and Focus Features have already passed; A24 has screened it but its position is unclear; Mubi and Neon are reportedly in pursuit. Every studio circling has its own AI infrastructure dependencies to weigh.

What’s been priced out of Hollywood’s risk model is the unauthorized portrait of a sitting tech principal whose company sits upstream of every studio’s compute bill. Altman attended Bezos’ wedding in Italy last year. Bezos, in Paris last week, said AI would create jobs rather than take them. The movie that complicates either sentence now belongs to whoever can afford not to need the favor.

Sources