Amazon MGM Studios has dropped Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s nearly finished film about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Variety and Deadline reported on Thursday. The film, which stars Andrew Garfield as Altman, had tested well with early audiences and was being shown to other studios the same day Amazon confirmed it would not release it.

The decision comes four months after Amazon committed $50 billion to OpenAI as part of a $110 billion funding round, a deal that also made AWS the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI’s enterprise platform. Amazon has not said whether its financial relationship with OpenAI influenced the decision, but the timing has drawn widespread attention from trade outlets and tech press alike.

“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,” an Amazon spokesperson told Variety. “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.”

Artificial is a comedic drama covering the chaotic five days in November 2023 when Altman was abruptly fired by OpenAI’s board and then reinstated as CEO. The board said at the time that Altman had not been “consistently candid” in his communications. Microsoft offered Altman a job almost immediately, and most of OpenAI’s roughly 770 employees threatened to resign if he was not brought back.

The cast extends well beyond Garfield. Monica Barbaro plays former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Yura Borisov plays former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk. Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Cooper Koch, Billie Lourd, Zosia Mamet, Angus Imrie, Chris O’Dowd, and Mark Rylance also feature.

The film was written by Simon Rich, an SNL alumnus, and produced with a reported budget of around $40 million.

According to Variety, insiders who have seen the film say the characters of Altman and Musk are the least sympathetic and the ones audiences would “like the least.” Reports also indicate the finished film’s tone grew considerably darker than Amazon initially expected when it greenlit the project, though Amazon had seen all early iterations of the script before Guadagnino came on board.

The financial ties between Amazon and OpenAI are substantial. Amazon’s $50 billion investment was part of a broader restructuring of the AI industry’s partnership landscape. OpenAI committed to spending $100 billion on AWS computing power and Trainium chips over eight years, and AWS became the exclusive third-party cloud distributor for OpenAI Frontier, the company’s enterprise AI platform.

There is also a personal dimension. Altman attended the wedding of Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez in Venice, Italy, in June 2025. Whether either the business relationship or the personal connection influenced the decision to drop the film remains unconfirmed, but the optics, as multiple outlets have noted, are difficult to separate from the outcome.

Altman has become an increasingly polarising figure in public life. Earlier this year, a man was charged with attempted murder after throwing a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s San Francisco home and threatening to burn down OpenAI’s headquarters, part of a broader wave of anti-AI backlash directed at the company’s leadership.

The Musk v. Altman trial, a $150 billion lawsuit over OpenAI’s conversion from a nonprofit to a for-profit structure, played out earlier this year and offered a public airing of the internal dynamics that Artificial dramatises. Musk, who co-founded OpenAI and left the board in 2018, has been one of Altman’s most vocal critics.

Amazon’s decision to shelve Artificial is not unprecedented in Hollywood, where studios regularly drop projects for creative or strategic reasons. But the convergence of a $50 billion investment, a personal friendship between the studio’s owner and the film’s subject, and a finished movie that reportedly paints that subject unfavourably creates a combination that is harder to explain away as a routine business call.

Other studios are now being shown the film. For a movie about the messy politics of the AI industry, losing its distributor to the messy politics of the AI industry is, at least, thematically consistent.