Several major Hollywood studios and distributors, including Warner Bros. and Netflix, have passed on buying the distribution rights to a feature film about OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman, according to Variety. The movie, Artificial, has finished shooting and is in the final stages of postproduction, but it now appears to be left mainly with smaller potential buyers such as the British streaming service Mubi.
Directed by Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino from a script by Simon Rich, the film centers on Altman’s failed ouster from OpenAI in late 2023. It stars Andrew Garfield as Altman, Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, and Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever. MGM, part of Amazon, developed the project and had been set to distribute it in early 2027.
That changed after Amazon approved the film’s production in June 2025. In recent months, Amazon and OpenAI struck a series of deals, including Amazon purchases of $38 billion in cloud services and $50 billion in investments in OpenAI. Against that backdrop, Amazon said over the weekend that it would not distribute the movie and gave Guadagnino permission to seek another distributor.
Recent screenings of the near-finished film to prospective distributors apparently did not help. Variety reported that the film portrays Altman as a pathological liar and Musk as a very extreme antagonist, which may have discouraged buyers. Warner Bros., Netflix, Focus Features, Clockwork, and A24 all passed. In some cases there may be business reasons, such as A24’s investors including Thrive Capital, run by Jared Kushner, which is also a major OpenAI backer and board member. But for others, especially Warner Bros. and Netflix, the decision may reflect fear of backlash from the AI industry and from figures like Musk. That leaves smaller distributors, notably Mubi and indie studio Neon, as the remaining possible homes for the film.
