Amazon MGM Studios Drops Nearly Finished Sam Altman Film That Had Been Shopped to Other Studios

Amazon MGM Studios has dropped the film Artificial, a nearly finished project about Sam Altman's 2023 firing and reinstatement as OpenAI chief executive. The studio greenlit and fast-tracked the film last year under director Luca Guadagnino. Amazon had reviewed every script iteration before Guadagnino joined the project.

"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 Variety. " The film had already been screened for other companies. It is not clear which studio might take on a project that Variety said portrayed Altman and Elon Musk as the least sympathetic characters.

Five months after reports emerged that Amazon was developing a film about Altman, OpenAI signed a $38 billion multi-year cloud contract with Amazon. The agreement gave OpenAI access to thousands of NVIDIA GB200 and GB300 GPUs through Amazon Web Services. In February 2026, the companies expanded their partnership further.

Amazon invested $50 billion in OpenAI and closed a separate deal for AWS to run OpenAI models for enterprise customers. Andrew Garfield stars as Altman. Monica Barbaro portrays former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati.

Yura Borisov plays former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Ike Barinholtz portrays Musk, an early OpenAI funder now in a legal dispute with the company.