Luca Guadagnino’s Sam Altman Movie ‘Artificial’ Will World Premiere at NYFF 2026 — SkimNews
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- "Artificial" will world premiere on October 5 at Alice Tully Hall as a late addition to the Main Slate of the 64th New York Film Festival, with Guadagnino and cast members in attendance, per Film at Lincoln Center's Tuesday announcement.
- Amazon MGM set up the film in early 2025 and completed production that fall, but dropped it in June after the corporation entered into a $50 billion deal with OpenAI for the AI company to use Amazon Web Services cloud functionality.
- Neon picked up the film "almost immediately" after Amazon dropped it, according to the source.
- Andrew Garfield stars as Sam Altman, Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, and Mark Rylance as Geoffrey Hinton, with the story tracing machine learning from 2003 through Sutskever's research under Hinton at the University of Toronto to Altman's co-founding of OpenAI.
- Simon Rich wrote the screenplay, which the festival describes as probing "the increasing gray areas between human and machine, truth and lie."
- NYFF Artistic Director Dennis Lim called the film one that "finds the perfect tone to tell the story of how we arrived at the AI precipice," adding that it traces that trajectory with "clear-eyed horror, dark humor, and a sense of existential urgency."
- Guadagnino's prior NYFF premieres include "Call Me by Your Name," "Bones and All," "Queer," and "After the Hunt," per the source.
Why it matters: Amazon's $50 billion cloud-services deal with OpenAI directly caused the studio to drop a film dramatizing that same company's founding — a striking conflict-of-interest moment that handed distribution rights to Neon and reframed the movie's release narrative around its corporate origin story.
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