GoKawiilAmazon MGM Studios has reportedly dropped the Sam Altman biopic Artificial, even though it's nearly finished, after the company deepened its partnership with OpenAI. According to Variety, the film directed by Luca Guadagnino has already had several test screenings that enjoyed positive reception. Amazon had a copy of all iterations of the script even before Guadagnino joined the project, so it knew what kind of film it was greenlighting and even fast-tracking last year.
"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," a spokesperson told the publication. "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."
Five months after reports came out that Amazon was developing a film about Sam Altman, OpenAI signed a $38 billion multi-year cloud contract with Amazon. It gives OpenAI access to "thousands" of NVIDIA GB200 and GB300 GPUs through Amazon Web Services for inference and training its next-generation models. In February this year, the companies expanded their partnership. Amazon invested $50 billion into OpenAI, and they closed another deal for AWS to run OpenAI models for enterprise customers.
Artificial revolves around Altman's controversial firing and reinstatement as CEO of OpenAI back in 2023. It stars Andrew Garfield as Altman, along with Monica Barbaro as former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati who served as interim CEO at the time, as well as Yura Borisov as former OpenAI chief scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever. Ike Barinholtz will portray Elon Musk, who was one of OpenAI's earliest funders and is now embroiled in a legal battle against it. Variety says the film portrayed Altman and Musk as the least sympathetic characters in the story. The film had already been screened for other companies, but it's not clear yet which studio fancies painting the head of OpenAI in a negative light.