Amazon has dropped their upcoming film Artificial, about OpenAI and its founder Sam Altman, four months after the two companies agreed to a “strategic partnership.”
Artificial, directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Andrew Garfield, was reportedly nearly complete and already having test screenings when Amazon MGM Studios announced Saturday that the company had parted way with the film, with Amazon alluding to the conflict of interest in a statement.
“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,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “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.”
Variety reports that Artificial has already been shopped to perspective studios and streaming services, ones that haven’t entered $100 billion+ partnerships with OpenAI; in February, Amazon Web Services and OpenAI announced a deal to “build generative AI applications and agents at production scale” and “develop customized models available to power Amazon’s customer-facing applications.” The deal included Amazon investing a further $50 billion into OpenAI on top of a $100 billion eight-year contract between the companies.With that much money involved, Amazon was likely reluctant to fully support (or even release) Artificial, which Variety says paints OpenAI founder Altman in a negative and unlikeable light. In addition to Garfield, Artificial also stars Monica Barbaro, Yura Borisov, Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Mark Rylance, and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk.
