Luca Guadagnino’s Nearly Finished Sam Altman Movie ‘Artificial’ Dropped by Amazon After OpenAI Partnership
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- Amazon MGM Studios dropped Luca Guadagnino's nearly finished Sam Altman biopic "Artificial" and will shop it to other distributors, Variety confirmed.
- The decision follows Amazon's February partnership with OpenAI, which expanded OpenAI's use of Amazon Web Services, included development of custom AI models, and carried a $50 billion investment from Amazon.
- An Amazon spokesperson cited "utmost respect and admiration" for Guadagnino but said the film "will be better served if it were released by a different studio."
- Andrew Garfield stars as Sam Altman, with Monica Barbaro as former CTO Mira Murati, Yura Borisov as former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk.
- The nearly completed film also features Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Mark Rylance, Chris O'Dowd, Billie Lourd, and Zosia Mamet.
- Puck first reported the news; Variety independently confirmed it.
Why it matters: Amazon's $50 billion OpenAI partnership apparently made releasing a critical Sam Altman biopic untenable for a studio now financially aligned with its subject. With a nearly finished film and a starry cast led by Andrew Garfield, Guadagnino's team must now find a distributor willing to release a movie about the CEO of its would-be parent's biggest AI partner.
