We have reached the point where every awards season produces a movie nobody wants to be seen with. This year, it might also be a movie that one very specific person would prefer no one sees at all.
That movie is “Artificial,” Luca Guadagnino’s dramatization of the 2023 weekend that nearly toppled OpenAI, which Amazon MGM Studios dropped from its slate, as Variety reported. The move came after Amazon struck a partnership with the tech company in February to expand OpenAI’s use of Amazon Web Services and develop custom AI models, a deal that included a $50 billion investment from Amazon.
Now, nearly two weeks later, Tom Quinn’s indie company Neon has closed a deal to acquire the film and confirmed it will get a qualifying release for this year’s Oscar race. The anticipated drama joins Neon’s expansive and crowded lineup, which includes high-profile Cannes acquisitions such as Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winner “Fjord,” starring Sebastian Stan; James Gray’s “Paper Tiger,” with Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson; and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Japanese drama “All of a Sudden,” in addition to titles still to come such as “Clarissa,” a reimagining of “Mrs. Dalloway” starring Sophie Okonedo, and “A Place in Hell,” with Michelle Williams and directed by Chloe Domont, whose sophomore feature follows her acclaimed 2023 debut “Fair Play.”
According to sources, discussions about any possible festival debut are in their early stages and ongoing. Nonetheless, the studio and filmmakers may already have the bones of a strong Oscar season narrative before a single frame is even shown.
Written by “SNL” alum Simon Rich, the film focuses on the brief period when Sam Altman was fired from his role at OpenAI and then rehired days later. Andrew Garfield plays Altman, with Monica Barbaro as former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Yura Borisov as former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk.
The parallels to the 2024 awards cycle of Ali Abbasi’s Donald Trump origin story “The Apprentice” are hard to ignore. Both are timely portraits of a powerful living figure. Both spooked the buyers who should have been fighting over them. And both arrive with the kind of baggage that seems to have studios’ legal and corporate-affairs departments misplacing their artistic backbones.
Amazon MGM developed “Artificial” and had planned to release it in early 2027, with chatter about qualifying it on this year’s calendar and even bowing it on the fall festival circuit, where Guadagnino has routinely debuted his work. Now the studio has walked away from the project entirely, a decision that landed just months after that $50 billion OpenAI commitment. Amazon insists the subject matter had nothing to do with its decision. Hollywood and a loud chunk of social media are reading it otherwise.
What happens next is where the awards story begins. Variety had previously reported that Focus Features, Warner Bros.’ Clockwork, A24 and Netflix all screened the film in the days after Amazon’s exit and passed, while Mubi pursued it before Neon ultimately put itself in pole position. Even the indies had reasons to be careful. A24, for instance, is backed by Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital, which holds a board seat and ranks among OpenAI’s largest and most high-profile backers.
That is the “Apprentice” playbook exactly. The Sebastian Stan-led Trump story scared off distributors and infuriated some producers with ties to Trump before Tom Ortenberg’s independent label, Briarcliff, stepped in. The gamble to go with a small-scale distributor ultimately paid off with Oscar attention, including a best actor nomination for Stan and a supporting nod for Jeremy Strong as lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn. The lesson strategists took from it was simple: Controversy isn’t always a weakness. Sometimes it fuels the campaign.
What makes “Artificial” so fascinating is that the film is reportedly very good. Conversations with industry professionals who have seen an unfinished cut that currently runs north of two hours describe it as Guadagnino’s answer to “The Social Network.” That is its own irony, given that Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning,” a standalone follow-up to the 2010 best picture-nominated drama, is set to open Oct. 9. Two Silicon Valley sagas in a single season could either feed off or eat into each other.
Coincidentally, Strong plays Mark Zuckerberg in the Sorkin film, while Garfield had a Golden Globe-nominated role in the 2010 original.
According to industry sources who have seen the film, Garfield delivers a “solid” and “surprising” turn in what one person described as a “campy” film. At the same time, two recent Oscar nominees — Borisov (“Anora”) and Barbaro (“A Complete Unknown”) — emerged as cast standouts. Another source says the movie is “Guadagnino’s best in nearly a decade.” In April, World of Reel reported a test screening that drew positive notices.
Nonetheless, this moment is what separates “Artificial” from Guadagnino’s recent run. The Italian director has not been nominated by the Academy since “Call Me by Your Name” in 2017 (he was nominated as a producer), which earned four total Oscar noms, winning best adapted screenplay for James Ivory. Everything since has generated critical divides, conversations and snubs on nomination morning. “Challengers” posted a worldwide gross of $96 million but failed to secure a single nomination despite early traction. “Queer” was billed as Daniel Craig’s Oscar vehicle and came up empty. The commercial picture has been softer still: “Suspiria” was a box-office disappointment, and neither “Queer” nor last year’s “After the Hunt” became the kind of earner that resets a filmmaker’s leverage.
So a movie that tests well, about a subject the entire culture is arguing about, lands in Guadagnino’s lap at precisely the moment he needs another breakthrough. The catch is that the same heat that kept some other potential buyers away is the heat that could carry it through a season.
Still in the final stages of post-production, “Artificial” had been eyeing a festival launch before Amazon’s abrupt exit. The movie could be in play for something as splashy as the Venice Film Festival, where the auteur has debuted many of his past movies. Neon could even opt for a launch like Telluride, where Guadagnino brought his unconventional (yet brilliant) “Bones and All.” Neon knows this terrain well.
“Artificial” reportedly paints Altman as a pathological liar and Musk as a villain. Instead of a horror story, the terror on display is the destruction that the tech bros are unleashing onto the world. Post-DOGE, do people want to buy tickets for that? Can they stomach it? “Artificial’s” commercial prospects were the question mark hanging over the executives who were considering it. Surely, Neon’s marketing team is weighing how best to position it — for both box office and awards prospects — now that the deal is done.
But as “Artificial” was saved by its white-knight distributor, it’s worth remembering that the riskiest title can also be the one with the clearest awards lane.
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