Amazon Drops Luca Guadagnino’s Sam Altman Movie After OpenAI Deal

Amazon flew too close to the sun, and now it’s not making a movie. Amazon MGM Studios just dropped Luca Guadagnino’s Sam Altman biopic, Artificial, from its roster. “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,” a spokesperson for Amazon told Variety. “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 February, OpenAI and Amazon announced a strategic partnership deal, with Amazon investing $50 million into the platform; the deal will include the use of Amazon Web Services and the development of custom AI models.

Written by Simon Rich, the film starred Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, following his intense 2023 firing and rehiring at OpenAI. Puck reports that other key figures depicted in the film include OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The film stars Mark Rylance, Andrew Garfield, Yura Borisov, Monica Barbaro, Billie Lourd, Jason Schwartzman, Cooper Koch, Cooper Hoffman, and Ike Barinholtz. Puck reports the film is already being screened to potential buyers.