Neon acquires Luca Guadagnino's Sam Altman drama 'Artificial' after Amazon MGM Studios drops it

Indie distributor Neon has acquired "Artificial," Luca Guadagnino's starry drama about Sam Altman and OpenAI, after Amazon MGM Studios abruptly dropped the nearly finished film earlier this month.

The decision is widely being read as fallout from Amazon's new $50 billion (€46bn) partnership with the AI company.

Artificial stars Andrew Garfield as Altman, with Monica Barbaro as former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, Yura Borisov as co-founder Ilya Sutskever and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk.

Written by SNL alumnus Simon Rich, the film has been billed as "The Social Network" for the AI era — a nod to David Fincher's 2010 drama about the founding of Facebook and the bitter fallout among its co-founders.

Artificial will recount the frantic 2023 weekend when Altman was fired by OpenAI's board and reinstated within days.

It was shot in San Francisco and Italy, and marked Guadagnino's third collaboration with Amazon MGM, following "Challengers" and "After the Hunt".

A deal too big to ignore

The director broke his silence on Italian talk show Otto e Mezzo, framing the saga as symptomatic of something larger than one cancelled release.

He argued that a small "tech oligarchy" now exercises "truly radical control" over the identity of "places like the United States and the entire world," pointing to the stark inequality he witnessed while filming in Silicon Valley's back yard, San Francisco.

The timing is the story here. Amazon pulled the film just months after finalising an expansive partnership with OpenAI, announced in late February.

The partnership will develop in two tranches: $15 billion (€13bn) paid immediately for Series C preferred stock, with a further $35 billion (€31bn) tied to milestones reportedly including OpenAI reaching certain technical benchmarks or completing an initial public offering.

The same deal expanded OpenAI's existing cloud agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to roughly $138 billion (€121bn) and made AWS the exclusive third-party distributor for Frontier, OpenAI's enterprise platform.

OpenAI also committed to running two gigawatts of workloads on Trainium, Amazon's in-house AI chip built as a cheaper alternative to Nvidia's GPUs.

Amazon said only that Artificial would "be better served if it were released by a different studio," praising Guadagnino as an "award-winning filmmaker" while insisting the film's subject matter and its unflattering depiction of Altman had nothing to do with the decision.

Few in the industry are buying that framing.

Just how unflattering is it?

Test screenings reportedly went well — though not because audiences left liking the subjects.

One insider who saw the film said Altman and Musk emerged as the least sympathetic characters, the ones viewers "would like least."

A buyer who screened it told podcaster Matt Belloni it was "dark" and "grim," leaving audiences unsettled about humanity's future. Amazon itself is said to have concluded the finished film was darker than the script had suggested.

Once Amazon exited, the film became Hollywood's hottest hot potato.

Netflix and Focus Features passed. A24 screened it but never confirmed interest — notably, the studio is backed by Josh Kushner's Thrive Capital, which holds a board seat at OpenAI and ranks among its largest investors, a reminder that Amazon is far from the only company with skin in the AI game.

Warner Bros.' Clockwork label also stepped away, before Mubi and Neon emerged as the frontrunners.

What's next

The rescue lands Guadagnino's film with a studio on an extraordinary run: Neon has backed the last seven consecutive Palme d'Or winners at Cannes, from "Parasite" in 2019 through this year's "Fjord," and has twice ridden a Cannes winner all the way to the Best Picture Oscar, with "Parasite" and "Anora."

Neon says it will push "Artificial" into this year's awards race, with a festival premiere still to be confirmed.

The backdrop, meanwhile, keeps shifting.

OpenAI has confidentially filed paperwork for a stock market listing that could value the company north of $850 billion (€745bn) — among the largest technology IPOs ever attempted — with Amazon's remaining $35 billion (€31bn) tranche reportedly contingent, in part, on that listing actually happening.

For a film about who gets to control a transformative, disruptive technology, its own tortured path to the screen has proven remarkably on-theme.