Netflix, A24, Focus Features, and Warner Bros.’ Clockwork have all reportedly decided to pass on picking up Artificial — director Luca Guadagnino’s new biographical drama about OpenAI cofounder / CEO Sam Altman — for distribution deals. And while Neon and Mubi are still said to be interested in the film, this situation makes it seem like Hollywood no longer has the courage to tell critical stories about Big Tech.
Postproduction on Artificial was nearly finished when Amazon MGM unexpectedly announced last week that it no longer plans to distribute the film. The news came as a surprise given how far along the movie was and reports that Amazon initially intended to give it a short, Oscar-qualifying theatrical run some time later this year. Artificial was also reportedly scheduled for a wider release in early 2027 and a showing at the SXSW Film & TV Festival, but those plans are now dead in the water.
Though Amazon hasn’t gone into detail about why it dropped Artificial, the company told Deadline that it felt the film would be “better served if it were released by a different studio.” While Neon or Mubi could ultimately be better homes for the project, Amazon’s decision follows its $50 billion investment into OpenAI from earlier this year. Amazon has made abundantly clear that it wants to be in the AI business in a big way, and it’s easy to understand why the company might be reluctant to release a film that portrays an AI executive in a negative light. But the larger issue is the fact that Amazon probably won’t be the last studio to move this way.
On paper at least, the entire saga reads like a drama that could make for a gripping and timely examination of one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful executives. After projects like The Audacity, Mountainhead, The Dropout, and Aaron Sorkin’s forthcoming The Social Reckoning, Artificial feels like the sort of film that aligns with Hollywood’s recent fixation on stories about tech titans. And in this era of generative AI being shoved down everyone’s throats, audiences are primed for a star-studded feature focused on some of the people responsible for the technology’s omnipresence.
All of this paints a very bleak picture of Hollywood’s possible future — one in which movies and series are produced with gen AI by studios that refuse to say anything truly insightful or negative about the technology or its creators. Projects like The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist have already shown us how uninspired and soulless films about AI can be when they’re crafted by people who seem beholden to tech executives. And what we’re looking at now is a potential age of Hollywood giants doing everything in their power to stay in Silicon Valley’s good graces. Operating that way — from a place of cowardice in service of tech-driven profits — is antithetical to producing good art.