Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial” has found a new home.
After being dropped by Amazon MGM Studios earlier this month, the filmmaker’s OpenAI drama has reportedly been acquired by Neon, according to Puck’s Matt Belloni (and the indie studio confirmed the news later in the day). The move gives the nearly finished film a distributor after a short but very public round of industry speculation over whether anyone would take on a sharp-edged movie about Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the 2023 corporate meltdown that briefly pushed Altman out of the company before his rapid return.
The film stars Andrew Garfield as Altman, with Monica Barbaro as former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, the OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist who played a key role in Altman’s ouster. Ike Barinholtz also appears as Elon Musk, with Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Cooper Koch, Billie Lourd, Zosia Mamet, Chris O’Dowd, and Mark Rylance among the broader ensemble.
Written by Simon Rich, “Artificial” centers on the chaotic few days in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Altman, triggering a corporate crisis, employee revolt, and pressure campaign that ended with his reinstatement less than a week later. The subject matter became even more complicated for Amazon as broader scrutiny and public discussion around Altman and OpenAI intensified during the film’s development.
Amazon had previously said it believed “Artificial” would be “better served” by another studio and that it was working with the filmmakers to find the project a new home. At the time, Neon and Mubi were said to be among the smaller distributors circling the movie after larger buyers passed on it.
Neon, however, is a particularly intriguing landing spot. The distributor has spent the last several years turning bold, filmmaker-driven titles into serious awards contenders, including multiple Palme d’Or winners and recent Oscar players. If “Artificial” is as prickly and timely as reported, Neon may be better suited than a tech-adjacent studio to sell the film as both a Guadagnino drama and a pointed look at Silicon Valley power.
No release date has been announced yet, but with Neon now on board, “Artificial” appears to be back in play after briefly looking like one of the stranger casualties of Hollywood’s increasingly complicated relationship with Big Tech, and could now easily show up on the fall film festival circuit, including Venice, where Guadagnino’s films have often debuted.
