Amazon Drops Nearly Finished Sam Altman Film Months After Signing $50 Billion OpenAI Deal

Amazon MGM Studios has walked away from Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s nearly finished dramatization of Sam Altman’s 2023 ouster from OpenAI, in a move that raises pointed questions about the relationship between corporate deal-making and editorial independence in Hollywood.

The film, which stars Andrew Garfield as Altman and wrapped principal photography in October 2025, is in post-production and had already completed several test screenings in Los Angeles — with strongly positive results — before Amazon pulled out. The studio confirmed it is working with the filmmaking team to find a new distributor, telling Variety it believes the film “will be better served if it were released by a different studio.” The project was originally slated for a 2027 release.

The timing tells most of the story. In February, Amazon announced a sweeping strategic partnership with OpenAI that included an initial $15 billion investment, with up to $35 billion more to follow, alongside a major expansion of OpenAI’s infrastructure on Amazon Web Services. That deal placed Amazon in a direct financial relationship with the subject of a film on its own roster — one whose portrayal of Altman, according to sources familiar with the cut, is far from flattering. Insiders told Variety that Altman and Elon Musk, played by Ike Barinholtz, are the characters audiences “like the least.”

The personal dimension compounds the business one. Altman attended Jeff Bezos’ wedding in Italy last year, and the two men are said to be friendly. That a studio would abandon a completed, well-received film by a prestigious director — this was to be Guadagnino’s third Amazon project, following Challengers and After the Hunt — suggests the calculus ran far beyond the usual distribution considerations.

The ensemble Guadagnino assembled is formidable: alongside Garfield, the cast includes Monica Barbaro as former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Yura Borisov as co-founder Ilya Sutskever, and supporting turns from Mark Rylance, Jason Schwartzman, Cooper Hoffman, Billie Lourd, and Chris O’Dowd. Written by Simon Rich, the film chronicles the five days in November 2023 when Altman was abruptly fired by OpenAI’s board and then reinstalled after a staff revolt. Artificial screened for other studios Thursday. No new distributor has yet been announced.