Director Luca Guadagnino declined to address Amazon MGM Studios dropping "Artificial" - a $40 million, nearly-complete film starring Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman that dramatizes the 2023 OpenAI board crisis. At a press appearance, Guadagnino said only, "We are right in the middle of this situation," while describing AI broadly as "changing the identity of the world." The decision, first reported by Puck, came from Amazon MGM chief Mike Hopkins - months after Amazon committed $50 billion to OpenAI in a multi-year AWS partnership. Amazon's statement called it a goodwill move: "We believe that Artificial will be better served if it were released by a different studio." The film, shot in San Francisco and Turin, Italy, will now be shopped to other distributors. The episode illustrates how large-scale commercial AI partnerships can create implicit pressure on adjacent media and content decisions.
Luca Guadagnino Says He Can’t Discuss Amazon Dropping ‘Artificial’ Because ‘We Are Right in the Middle of This Situation,’ But AI Is ‘Changing the Identity of the World’