Luca Guadagnino made a movie about Sam Altman. Amazon made a $50 billion deal with OpenAI. Then Amazon dropped the movie. You can connect those dots yourself. The first teaser for Artificial is finally here, and it’s every bit as uncomfortable as you’d hope.
The film chronicles the five-day circus in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Altman, only for him to come back days later after everyone realized the company would implode without him. Andrew Garfield plays Altman. Monica Barbaro plays Mira Murati, the interim CEO who briefly held the reins. Yura Borisov is Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist who reportedly had a lot to do with the firing. Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk, which is either perfect casting or a war crime. Mark Rylance is Geoffrey Hinton. The supporting cast includes Jason Schwartzman, Zosia Mamet, Cooper Hoffman, Chris O’Dowd, Cooper Koch, and Billie Lourd. That’s a lot of famous people for a movie about one very bad week at a tech company.
Amazon MGM Studios dropped Artificial earlier this year, just months after announcing a massive partnership with OpenAI. The studio said the film would be “better served if it were released by a different studio.” Translation: we don’t want to upset our new business partners. Netflix, A24, and Focus all passed. Neon swooped in and bought the $40 million film. Now Artificial is getting a full Oscar campaign. The film that was too hot for Amazon is suddenly the one Neon thinks can win awards. Make it make sense.
The trailer doesn’t waste time. Garfield’s Altman talks about opening Pandora’s box, about countries falling, about industries collapsing. He’s excited about it. The teaser also shows him walking into a room full of weapons, because subtlety is for cowards. The film isn’t interested in a balanced portrait. It’s interested in the specific madness of people who believe they’re saving the world while building something they can’t control.
The real story is wild enough on its own. Altman was fired on a Friday. By Monday, hundreds of OpenAI employees had signed a letter threatening to quit unless he came back. The board folded. Altman returned. The whole thing played out like a Succession episode written by someone with a grudge. Artificial takes that raw material and cranks the paranoia up to eleven. The trailer suggests the film is less interested in who was right and more interested in how close we all came to watching the most important AI company in the world eat itself alive.
Simon Rich wrote the script. Guadagnino directed. The film premieres at the New York Film Festival in October before hitting theaters on Christmas Day. Because nothing says holiday cheer like a paranoid tech thriller about the end of civilization. Artificial is the movie Amazon didn’t want you to see. Neon made sure you will. If you’ve ever wanted to watch Andrew Garfield monologue about the collapse of society while dressed like a tech CEO, this is your moment.
The release strategy is also a choice. Christmas Day is when families gather to watch movies about hope and redemption. Artificial is about the opposite of that. It’s a movie about ambition, fear, and the terrifying realization that the people building our future are just as messy and petty as the rest of us. Guadagnino has never been subtle, and Artificial looks like his least subtle film yet. Good.