Andrew Garfield spent months this year learning to move like Sam Altman, the boyish chief executive of OpenAI who was fired by his board in November 2023 and reinstated days later. The performance, captured in a 40 million dollar film called “Artificial,” directed by Luca Guadagnino, was finished and awaiting release. Then Amazon MGM, the studio that had backed it, walked away.
On Tuesday, the film found a new home. Neon, the independent distributor behind a string of art-house successes, said it had won the rights to “Artificial” after a bidding process that involved several companies. Neon said the film would be released this year and positioned for the awards season. The movie stars Monica Barbaro, Yura Borisov and Mark Rylance, with Ike Barinholtz playing Elon Musk.
The story is one of the most dramatic episodes in modern Silicon Valley. The OpenAI board fired Altman in November 2023, a decision that briefly threw the future of the most important company in artificial intelligence into doubt. Employees threatened mass resignation, investors lobbied, and within days Altman was back as chief executive with a new board. Guadagnino’s film turns that week into a corporate thriller with an ensemble cast.
Amazon’s decision to drop the film was the twist that made its distribution a story of its own. Months before the release plans collapsed, Amazon had announced it would invest 50 billion dollars in OpenAI, one of the largest corporate bets on the company and on AI more broadly. Amazon said at the time that releasing “Artificial” through a different distributor would be better for the film. The statement was carefully worded; the situation was not.
For Neon, the acquisition is a gamble with a clear upside. The company has made a specialty of turning unconventional films into awards contenders, most notably with “Parasite,” which won the best picture Oscar in 2020. A film about the man at the center of the AI boom, arriving as the industry’s impact on daily life becomes impossible to ignore, fits the Neon playbook: serious filmmaking with a cultural hook.
The bidding itself was a measure of Hollywood’s ambivalence about the subject matter. Tech executives are not usually box office draws, and films about them have a mixed record. But the AI industry has become too big for the movie business to ignore, and the number of distributors willing to bid on a film that one of the world’s largest companies had abandoned suggests the appetite is real.
There are practical complications. Amazon’s investment in OpenAI means the company that financed the film has a financial interest in the company the film depicts. Distributors weighing the rights had to consider whether Amazon would stand behind a release it had walked away from, and whether the film’s content, which reportedly does not flatter every party involved, could create problems for anyone holding OpenAI stock. Amazon’s own decision to step aside was widely read as an acknowledgment of that tension.
Guadagnino’s involvement raised the film’s profile from the start. The Italian director is known for “Call Me by Your Name” and “Challengers,” and his interest in the Altman story signaled that the subject was being treated as serious drama rather than tech-world fan service. The casting of Garfield, who spent time studying Altman’s public appearances and mannerisms, added credibility to the production.
The film’s release date has not been set beyond “this year,” and The film arrives at a moment when the public’s relationship with AI is shifting. Surveys show more people using AI tools at work and at home, and the industry has moved from a curiosity to a source of economic and political anxiety. A serious dramatization of the OpenAI board drama, the closest thing the technology world has produced to a palace coup, gives audiences a way into a story they have been following in headlines for years.
Neon’s awards strategy will depend on when it lands. A fall festival premiere would give the film momentum into Oscar season, but it would also put the movie in theaters just as the companies involved are managing their public images around AI. Whether that timing helps or hurts the film is impossible to predict.
For Amazon, the episode closes a strange chapter. The company kept its 50 billion dollar investment, kept its cloud relationship with OpenAI and dropped a film it no longer wanted to be connected to. For Neon, the bet is that audiences want to see the week Altman almost lost everything. The distributor is betting that the story of the AI era’s most dramatic days can fill theaters, Neon declined to say how much it paid for the rights, but people familiar with the negotiations said the price was below the film’s production budget, reflecting the unusual circumstances of the sale. Amazon MGM retains a financial stake through its original investment and will receive a share of any profits, a structure that lets both sides claim a measure of victory in an arrangement neither would have chosen willingly.
even if the people who lived it would rather the film had never been made.
