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The first trailer for the Sam Altman biopic is damn creepy

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Why This Matters

Hollywood is turning a very recent tech news cycle \u2014 OpenAI's 2023 boardroom coup \u2014 into mainstream drama barely three years later, with Andrew Garfield playing Sam Altman in a Luca Guadagnino film styled more like horror than hagiography. The messy path to distribution, including Amazon MGM dropping the project after a massive OpenAI investment, is itself a case study in how tech money shapes what stories get told.

Key Takeaways
Worth a Look

Karen Hao "Empire of AI" (hardcover) — If the Artificial trailer has you curious about what actually happened inside OpenAI, Karen Hao's Empire of AI digs into the company, Sam Altman and the wider AI boom in detail. It's a great companion read before the film hits theaters on Christmas Day.

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We finally have a trailer for the long-awaited Sam Altman biopic, which is appropriately-named Artificial. It stars Andrew Garfield as the OpenAI CEO and the film is directed by Luca Guadagnino, who made Call Me by Your Name, Challengers and the Suspiria remake, among other movies.

The trailer is actually pretty creepy, giving more of a horror vibe than a biopic. Harrowing music plays as Garfield puts on his best robotic Altman impression to sing the virtues of AI. He also calls it Pandora's Box and says "countries will fall" and "industries are gonna collapse."

As he discusses how "the future is inevitable," Garfield walks past a room filled with weapons in some kind of bunker. Finally, there are scenes of him celebrating success and, uh, screaming into the void. It looks like a good time!

Artificial covers events from 2023 in which Altman was suddenly fired and then reinstated with OpenAI five days later. It hits theaters on Christmas Day, just three years after the story that inspired it. That's pretty quick. The film also stars Yura Borisov, Monica Barbaro, Ike Barinholtz, Jason Schwartzman and Mark Rylance.

We weren't sure that this movie would ever come out. Amazon MGM was set to release the film but dropped the project after investing $50 billion into OpenAI. At the time, the company said it would "be better served if it were released by a different studio." Netflix, A24 and Focus all passed on it. Finally, Neon signed on as a distributor.