TL;DR
Four months after investing $50 billion in OpenAI, Amazon released Altman’s nearly finished film about the OpenAI fire in 2023, Artificial. Other studios are circling.
Amazon MGM Studios dropped ArtificialLuca Guadagnino’s film about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is almost finished, Variety and Deadline reported Thursday. Starring Andrew Garfield as Altman, the film tested well with early audiences and was released to other studios on the day Amazon confirmed it would not release it.
The decision is made after four months Amazon has committed $50 billion to OpenAI A deal that makes AWS the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI’s enterprise platform, as part of a $110 billion funding round. Although Amazon did not say whether its financial ties to OpenAI influenced the decision, the timing drew widespread attention from the mall and tech press.
“We have great respect and admiration for Luca Guadagnino as an award-winning director, not to mention a long-term relationship that we hope will continue.“An Amazon spokesperson told Variety.”We believe Artificial would be better served if released by another studio and worked closely with the film’s creative team to find a new home for the film.“
Artificial is a comedy-drama that follows the chaotic five days in November 2023, when Altman is abruptly fired by OpenAI’s board and then reinstated as CEO. The board said at the time that Altman was absent.consistently sincereMicrosoft offered Altman a job almost immediately, and most of OpenAI’s roughly 770 employees threatened to quit if he wasn’t paid back.
The cast goes well beyond Garfield. Monica Barbaro plays former OpenAI technical director Mira Murati, Yura Borisov plays former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk. Also starring Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Cooper Koch, Billie Lourd, Zosia Mamet, Angus Imrie, Chris O’Dowd and Mark Rylance.
The film was written by SNL alumnus Simon Rich and produced on a budget of around $40 million.
According to Variety, insiders who have seen the film say that Altman and Musk’s characters are the least sympathetic and that audiences will sympathize with them.as the least.” Reports also indicate that the tone of the finished film was much darker than Amazon expected when it greenlit the project, even though Amazon had seen all the first iterations of the script before Guadagnino came on board.
The financial ties between Amazon and OpenAI are significant. Amazon’s $50 billion investment was part of a broader restructuring of the AI industry’s partnership landscape. OpenAI has committed to spending $100 billion on AWS computing power and Trainium chips over eight years, and AWS has become the exclusive third-party cloud distributor for OpenAI Frontier, the company’s enterprise AI platform.
There is also a personal dimension. Altman attended the wedding of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez in Venice, Italy in June 2025. It has yet to be confirmed whether business or a personal connection influenced the decision to shelve the film, but as multiple outlets have pointed out, it’s hard to separate the optics from the outcome.
Altman became an increasingly polarizing figure in public life. Earlier this year He was charged with attempted murder after throwing a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s home in San Francisco. and threatened to burn down OpenAI’s headquarters, part of a wider wave of backlash against AI targeting company management.
Musk v. Altman, the $150 billion lawsuit over OpenAI’s transformation from a nonprofit to a for-profit entity, took place earlier this year and offered a public airing of the internal dynamics that Suni has dramatized. Musk, who co-founded OpenAI and left the board in 2018, has been one of Altman’s fiercest critics.
Amazon’s decision to shelve Artificial is not unprecedented in Hollywood, where studios routinely abandon projects for creative or strategic reasons. But the prospect of a $50 billion investment, a personal friendship between a studio owner and a film’s subject, and a finished film that paints that subject unfavorably creates a combination that’s harder to explain away as a simple business call.
Currently, the film is being screened in other studios. For a film about the messy politics of the AI industry, losing its distributor to the messy politics of the AI industry is at least thematically consistent.
