Amazon Drops Nearly Finished Sam Altman Movie About OpenAI

A much-anticipated movie with huge stars, a major director, and a potentially very sellable premise about a hot-button subject has been dropped by its distributor even though the movie is almost completed.

The movie is called Artificial, a docudrama about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his company. Amazing Spider-Man star Andrew Garfield plays Altman; Luca Guadagnino (Challengers, After the Hunt) directed the movie. It was going to be released by Amazon MGM Studios, but now that plan is off.

In a statement to Variety, Amazon said

We have the utmost respect and admiration for Luca Guadagnino as an award-winning filmmaker — not to mention a longstanding relationship that we hope to continue. We believe that ‘Artificial’ will be better served if it were released by a different studio and are working closely with the filmmaking team to find the film a new home.

In addition to Garfield, the cast of the movie includes Monica Barbaro, Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, and with The Studio’s Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk. Per Variety, the film “focuses on the brief period Altman was fired from his position at OpenAI in 2023 and then rehired.”

Kate Green, Getty Images

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Amazon notably announced a “strategic partnership” with OpenAI back in February of this year. Amazon invested $50 billion in OpenAI while the two companies also said they would “co-create a Stateful Runtime Environment powered by OpenAI models, available on Amazon Bedrock for AWS customers to build generative AI applications and agents at production scale.”

Variety’s report claims that Artificial is being screened for other studios who might be interested in distributing the film. It also states the movie already had several test screenings “which went down very positively” and that “the characters of Altman and Musk are the least sympathetic and the ones audiences would ‘like the least.’” Surely that has nothing to do with any of this…