Sam Altman at OpenAI DevDay in San Francisco in 2023. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop)
Amazon’s latest film drama isn’t a movie that it’s producing or streaming, but rather the situation surrounding a project it has dropped.
Amazon MGM Studios has backed away from “Artificial,” a nearly finished film about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The studio said last week that the film would “be better served if it were released by a different studio,” according to reports in Puck, Variety, and elsewhere.
The film, directed by Luca Guadagnino, stars Andrew Garfield as Altman and focuses on the brief period when Altman was fired from his position at OpenAI in 2023 and then rehired, according to Variety. The film has been referred to as “‘The Social Network,’ but for the AI era,” in a nod to the 2010 film about Facebook.
The New York Times reported that Amazon MGM had spent around $40 million on the project and had tested it in four markets. The decision to drop the film, planned for a 2027 release, “shocked the filmmakers,” the Times said.
Amazon announced a $50 billion investment and strategic partnership with OpenAI in February. The ChatGPT maker and Amazon Web Services deepened their technical ties, expanding an existing $38 billion multi-year agreement by $100 billion over eight years, with OpenAI planning to run more of its AI workloads on AWS.
Amazon said it is “working closely with the filmmaking team to find the film a new home.” The Hollywood Reporter said Netflix and Focus Features have both passed on “Artificial.”
Puck, which first reported the news, said the finished film struck Mike Hopkins, the head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, as darker in tone than the script Amazon had originally bought, and that Hopkins made the decision to drop it after watching a cut. Amazon’s public statement gave no reason.
Guadagnino, who directed the 2017 Oscar winner “Call Me by Your Name,” previously worked with Amazon MGM on “After the Hunt” and “Challengers.”
“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,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.
Other “Artificial” cast members include Monica Barbaro as former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Yura Borisov as former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk.
