Luca Guadagnino’s OpenAI Movie Will Launch at NYFF

After quite the rough-and-tumble year, Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, about OpenAI, Sam Altman, and the controversial firing and almost immediate rehiring of Altman back in 2023, will have its premiere at this year’s New York Film Festival in the Main Slate selection. Starring After the Hunt’s scene-stealing Andrew Garfield as Altman and Anora’s Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, the key player in Altman’s initial firing, Artificial got dropped by Amazon MGM earlier this year for reasons that are … not necessarily due to Amazon’s partnership with OpenAI but not not that also. After a bit of shopping, Neon grabbed Artificial, which was still in postproduction as of just a few weeks ago. If there’s anything Amazon MGM accomplished by dropping the movie, it was Streisand effect Artificial’s potency as an indictment of the tech world.

Broligarchs, be damned, because NYFF is kind of a perfect place for a movie like Artificial to land. The festival’s been home to Guadagnino’s past few films, including the aforementioned After the Hunt, Queer, and Bones & All. (Challengers didn’t but should play at NYFF every year, maybe, just because.) With a script by Simon Rich, best known for his work on SNL, Miracle Workers, and most recently the play All In, Artificial promises to be one of the festival’s major talking points, and that’s before we even get to whatever Ike Barinholtz’s Elon Musk impersonation winds up being.