OpenAI’s Sam Altman, presumably irate about Luca Guagdagnino‘s Artificial portraying him as some kind of shithead, civilization-destroying villain, has seemingly persuaded Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to drop Artificial and cast it out upon the heaving seas.
Another distributor will step into the breach, of course, but this obviously means that Artificial absolutely, positively has to premiere at the 2026 Venice Film Festival, going right up against Aaron Sorkin‘s The Social Reckoning. Because it’s now officially a controversial hot-potato film, and there can be no wimping out any more. No more candy-assing! This situation needs real men.
Puck reported the news first; Variety‘s Ellise Shafer and Alex Ritman quickly followed up.
Variety #1: “The move notably comes after Amazon struck a massive partnership with the tech company in February to expand OpenAI’s use of Amazon Web Services and develop custom AI models, which included a $50 billion investment on Amazon’s part.” Altman and Bezos are pally-wallies. Variety has reported: that Altman attended Bezos’s Italian wedding last year.
Variety #2: “Variety understands that, prior to being dropped by Amazon, Artificial already had several test screenings, which went down very positively, and screened for other studios on Thursday. According to an insider who has seen the movie, the characters of Altman and Musk are the least sympathetic and the ones audiences would “like the least”. It’s also understood that Amazon had seen all the early iterations of the script, before Guadagnino boarded the project.”
The leading good guy in Artificial is Yura Borisov‘s Ilya Sutskever, the former OpenAI chief scientist. Borisov scored big-time as the tender, considerate, bald-headed goon in Anora.
Andrew Garfield plays Altman, Monica “Joan Baez” Barbaro is former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, and Ike Barinholtz plays effing Elon Musk. Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Cooper Koch, Billie Lourd, Zosia Mamet, Angus Imrie, Chris O’Dowd and Mark Rylance costar. Penned by Simon Rich, the script is primarily about a brief period in ’23 when Altman was canned from his position at OpenAI, and was then rehired.
