Neon Picks Up Sam Altman Film 'Artificial' After Amazon Drops It
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Neon acquired U.S. rights to the Luca Guadagnino-directed film "Artificial" after Amazon MGM dropped it last week, with the company confirming the deal first reported by Puck's Matt Belloni.
- Amazon MGM dropped the film shortly after setting a $50 billion deal with OpenAI to use Amazon Web Services cloud functionality, abandoning a planned early 2027 release.
- "Artificial" stars Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, Monica Barbaro as CTO Mira Murati, Mark Rylance as AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, and Yura Borisov as OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever.
- CAA Media Finance held screenings with Netflix, A24, Focus Features, and Warner Bros.' Clockwork label after Amazon dropped the film — all four passed on acquiring it.
- One buyer who saw the film described it to Belloni as "grim," "dark," saying it "makes you feel bad after watching it about the future of the human race."
- Neon announced the film "will compete in this year's Oscar race," though no release date has been set, and Amazon MGM previously released two of Guadagnino's films — "Challengers" ($96 million global) and "After the Hunt" ($9.4 million).
- Simon Rich, an "SNL" writer, penned the screenplay, which chronicles Altman's 2023 firing and reinstatement as OpenAI CEO.
Why it matters: Amazon walked away from a film critical of a CEO whose company it had just signed a $50 billion cloud deal with — and no major buyer (Netflix, A24, Focus, Warner Bros.) touched the project, suggesting the picture's dark tone about AI's risks may be commercially toxic even as the AI arms race it depicts accelerates.
