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Amazon drops Sam Altman movie after announcing OpenAI partnership<br>Luca Guadagnino’s nearly completed biopic stars Andrew Garfield as the controversial OpenAI founder

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SPONSORED BY AMAZON<br>Amazon MGM is no longer partnering with Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino on his forthcoming Sam Altman biopic, Artificial.<br>The nearly completed film, starring Andrew Garfield as the controversial OpenAI founder, was originally slated for release in early 2027.<br>The premiere date, however, is now in limbo after the film was removed from the studio’s roster months after Amazon agreed to expand its $38 billion, multi-year deal to run OpenAI’s systems on its cloud services. The new partnership, announced in February, includes a $50 billion investment in the AI company and the development of customized AI models.

“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 for Amazon said to Variety in a statement. “We believe that Artificial will be better served if it were released by a different studio and are working closely with the filmmaking team to find the film a new home.”<br>The Independent has contacted Amazon for further comment.

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Luca Guadagnino's next feature film, 'Artificial,' is a biopic about the OpenAI founder Sam Altman (pictured) (Getty Images)<br>Artificial would have marked the Oscar-nominated Call Me By Your Name director’s third Amazon film, following the critically acclaimed Zendaya-led tennis romance Challengers (2024) and the academic scandal drama After the Hunt (2025), starring Julia Roberts.<br>The new movie is said to chronicle the brief period when Altman was abruptly ousted as OpenAI’s CEO in 2023 and subsequently rehired. Monica Barbaro and Ike Barinholtz star alongside Garfield as former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, while Yura Borisov, Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Cooper Koch, Billie Lourd, Zosia Mamet, Angus Imrie, Chris O’Dowd, Mark Rylance and Margo’s Got Money Troubles breakout Thaddea Graham round out the cast.

It is unclear exactly why the film was dropped, but according to Variety, the news came after it had already undergone positive screen tests.<br>open image in gallery

'Artificial' would have been Luca Guadagnino's third movie with Amazon (AFP/Getty)<br>An early viewer told the publication that the film’s portrayals of Altman and newly minted trillionaire Musk are the two characters audiences would “like the least.” It was also reported that Amazon had already seen every early iteration of the script before Guadagnino was hired to direct.

Altman and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have developed a high-profile friendship over the years. In fact, the former was in attendance at Bezos’s wedding to Lauren Sánchez, which took place in Venice, Italy, in 2025.<br>In recent months, the two have continued to deepen their professional partnership that began in 2015, when Amazon became one of OpenAI’s first investors. Ten years later, the companies closed their first major deal in November 2025, allowing the ChatGPT maker to run its systems on Amazon’s U.S. data centers.

Artificial is reportedly being screened by other studios in a bid for a new distributor.

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