‘Artificial’ is a film already completely finished. Luca Guadagnino, director of ‘Rivals’ and ‘Call Me by Your Name’, filmed it between July and October 2025, with Andrew Garfield in the role of one of the men of the moment, Sam Altman. It has been shown in different test runs and has been liked. It cost 40 million dollars. And on Friday, June 20, 2026, Amazon announced that it would put it in a drawer and not distribute it.
What happened. The decision It came from Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, who personally communicated the resolution to Guadagnino’s team. The director was dismayed and Amazon communicated this in an extremely diplomatic, almost incomprehensible way: “We have the greatest respect and admiration for Luca Guadagnino as an award-winning filmmaker, and also a long-standing relationship that we hope to continue. We believe that ‘Artificial’ will work better in another studio and we are working closely with the team to find it a new home.” Of course, data is missing here.
What really happened. On February 27, 2026, four months before the announcement, Amazon and OpenAI announced a multi-year strategic alliance. Amazon will invest $50 billion in OpenAI, starting with $15 billion immediately and an additional $35 billion when certain conditions are met. AWS becomes the exclusive cloud delivery provider for OpenAI Frontier, the company’s enterprise AI agent platform. In addition, OpenAI expands its infrastructure consumption agreement on AWS by $100 billion over eight years, and commits to deploying approximately 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity, Amazon’s proprietary chips.
Why ‘Artificial’ is so controversial. ‘Artificial’ it has a comedy point bitter, and comes with the stamp of screenwriter Simon Rich, who worked on none other than ‘Saturday Night Live’. The story focuses on the 72 hours in November 2023 when the OpenAI board removed Altman and He hired him again days later.. The comparison with ‘The Social Network’, the film by David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin about the origins of Facebook, has come up numerous times among those who have been able to see ‘Artificial’.
Also it has been said that Altman is portrayed as a pathological liar, and is described by another character in the film as “one of the most manipulative people on the planet.” All of this, of course, had been approved by Amazon, although the film apparently became darker as filming progressed. Some speculation suggests that Amazon saw the setup, realized the potential damage to its numbers and image, and that they simply did not want to commit billions at a stroke. Even more, is spoken that Amazon’s investment in OpenAI “undoubtedly” influenced the decision to abandon the film.
September 2026. OpenAI wants to debut on the stock market in September 2026, with a valuation of between $730 billion and $850 billion. The company filed its confidential S-1 with the SEC on May 22, 2026. If the Initial Public Offering prepared by OpenAI goes well, Amazon’s stake appreciates very substantially. Possibly, the view of Altman as a pathological liar does not benefit this stock market bet, and Amazon does not want to be behind this hypothetical put a spanner in the works.
Nobody wants ‘Artificial’. For some time now, we have seen how this same path that ‘Artificial’ has begun to take was experienced by films produced by companies eager not to spend more money than strictly necessary. It happened with ‘Coyote vs.- ACME‘, which has finally found its way, or with ‘The war of tomorrow‘, which Paramount produced and Prime Video released in the pandemic. The curious thing about this case is that no one seems to want to approach the project.
CAA Media Finance, which represents Guadagnino, has been conducting private passes for potential distributorsand the likes of Netflix, A24, Focus Features, and Warner Bros.’ Clockwork have all nixed the project. At the moment, only Mubi or Neon are potential candidates. And how is this, that A24, queen of independents and difficult projectsAren’t you interested? Well, because the distributor is backed by Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital, who sits on OpenAI’s board and is among its most prominent investors. Amazon’s story repeats itself with A24 because AI money is widespread throughout the entertainment financial ecosystem. And so it is difficult to produce ambitious and independent films.
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