Amazon MGM Studios spent two years and roughly $40 million making a film about Sam Altman. Then, the week it was ready to show the world, the studio decided the world shouldn't see it — not from Amazon, anyway.
"Artificial," directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Andrew Garfield as the OpenAI chief executive, dramatises the five chaotic days in November 2023 when Altman was fired by his own board and reinstated less than a week later. Test screenings had gone well. The cast — Monica Barbaro as former CTO Mira Murati, Yura Borisov as former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk — was stacked with names. The film was finished, polished, and being shown to rival studios the same day Amazon confirmed it would not release it.
The timing is the story. Four months earlier, Amazon had committed $50 billion to OpenAI as part of a $110 billion funding round, with AWS becoming OpenAI's exclusive third-party cloud provider. Altman and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos are reportedly close — Altman attended Bezos's wedding in Venice last year. None of that proves cause and effect. But it has every trade outlet in Hollywood asking the same question: when a tech giant becomes an AI company's banker, what happens to the unflattering movie already sitting on its shelf?
