Luca Guadagnino, the director of Challengers, has made a starry film about OpenAI founder Sam Altman. Amazon has sensationally decided not to release it. Here’s a startling story. Artificial, a biopic by a highly respected filmmaker, about a hot-button subject and featuring a cast of familiar names, has suddenly been dropped by its studio. What ... Artificial | Amazon dumps Luca Guadagnino’s film about Sam Altman and OpenAI
Luca Guadagnino, the director of Challengers, has made a starry film about OpenAI founder Sam Altman. Amazon has sensationally decided not to release it.
Here’s a startling story. Artificial, a biopic by a highly respected filmmaker, about a hot-button subject and featuring a cast of familiar names, has suddenly been dropped by its studio. What on earth…?
Luca Guadagnino, the filmmaker behind such critically acclaimed dramas as Call Be By Your Name and Challengers, has spent the past year or so making Artificial, a biopic about tech billionaire Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI and carnival barker for its best-known product, ChatGPT.
Andrew Garfield stars as Altman, leading a cast which also includes Cooper Hoffman, Monica Barbaro, Mark Rylance and Jason Schwartzman. Made for a budget of about $40m, it’s said to be almost finished – but now its distributor, Amazon MGM, has taken a look at the film and decided not to release it.
Puck's Matt Belloni broke the story (which reaches us via World Of Reel), and it’s not some sort of industry rumour. A representative from Amazon even came forward with a statement, confirming that while the company has “the utmost respect and admiration” for Guadagnino, it believes that “Artificial will be better served if it were released by a different studio.”
The question then becomes: why? One possibility is that the film is such an outright creative disaster that Amazon simply wants to cut its losses. That’s a possibility, but given the utter bilge the mega-corporation is willing to upload to its Prime Video service, seems a bit far-fetched.
Even if the film is a cosplay embarrassment, as some biopics turn out to be, its subject alone would guarantee it plenty of attention (and therefore, lucrative clicks): for better and mostly worse, ChatGPT is one of the most talked-about pieces of tech on the planet. Everyone is alternately talking, boosting and panicking about the implications of generative AI.
The other possibility is that Artificial’s approach and tone is too much for Amazon to handle. Puck’s report suggests that the film, written by Simon Rich, offers a less-than-flattering depiction of Altman – something that lines up with reporter Roman Farrow’s recent investigative piece for The New Yorker, which openly questioned whether he could be trusted as the CEO of one of the biggest companies in tech.
Amazon is itself a tech company first and foremost, and may have decided not to stir this particular hornets’ nest. As Beloni points out, Amazon has financial deals in place with OpenAI which it probably doesn’t want to jeopardise with something as inconsequential as a drama that criticises Altman.
It’s also worth pointing out that the decision to drop Artificial is alleged to have come from Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios – the same exec who decided to spend $40m on disgraced filmmaker Brett Ratner’s puff-piece documentary, Melania.
A new home for Artificial is now being sought. If anything, Amazon may have done Guadagnino a favour; certainly, we’re now wondering what it is about the film that has spooked Amazon into cutting its losses.
We’ll bring you more on this as we get it.
