Neon Acquires Guadagnino's Sam Altman Film After Amazon Drop
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- Neon confirmed the acquisition of U.S. rights to "Artificial" after Amazon MGM dropped the film last week in the wake of its $50 billion deal for OpenAI to use Amazon Web Services cloud functionality.
- Amazon MGM had the film set up for a planned early 2027 release, but said in a statement the project would be "better served if it were released by a different studio" and that it was helping find a new home.
- CAA Media Finance held buyer screenings with Netflix, A24, Focus Features, and Warner Bros.' Clockwork label after Amazon's exit — all passed before Neon stepped in to close the deal.
- "Artificial" stars Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, Monica Barbaro as CTO Mira Murati, Mark Rylance as Geoffrey Hinton, Yura Borisov as OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk.
- Written by Simon Rich, the film covers Altman's 2023 board-orchestrated ouster and swift reinstatement; one buyer told Matt Belloni the picture is "grim, it's dark, it goes there, and it makes you feel bad after watching it about the future of the human race."
- Neon said the film "will compete in this year's Oscar race," though no release date has been set; the distributor previously handled Guadagnino's "Challengers" ($96M global) partner "After the Hunt" ($9.4M) at Amazon MGM.
Why it matters: Amazon's $50 billion OpenAI cloud deal proved more valuable to the studio than releasing a critical portrait of its new partner's CEO, leaving the film with a distributor that has Oscar credibility but lacks Amazon's marketing firepower. For Altman and OpenAI, a film described as making viewers "feel bad about the future of the human race" now enters awards season without a major-studio release apparatus behind it.
