Fifty billion dollars bought Amazon MGM a problem. That is the figure the tech giant invested in OpenAI through a partnership that included expanding Amazon Web Services and developing custom AI models. Months after that deal was signed, the studio shelved “Artificial” — a film starring Andrew Garfield as OpenAI chief Sam Altman.
Director Luca Guadagnino will not explain exactly what happened. “Unfortunately, I can’t say much because we are right in the middle of this situation,” he said Friday on the Italian talk show “Otto e Mezzo.” The situation is a concrete one.
A major motion picture, fully shot, starring a two-time Oscar nominee, was dropped by a studio that had already committed to it. Guadagnino compared it to CBS canceling a drama series about the Reagans in 2003 after Republican pressure — a show that eventually aired on a smaller network. The parallel is direct: commercial and political forces killed a project about a powerful figure.
MUBI is still considering picking up “Artificial.” Netflix, A24 and Focus Features have already passed. The stakes here are not abstract.
A studio tied to a company investing tens of billions in AI infrastructure chose not to distribute a film about the CEO of that industry’s most prominent firm. Guadagnino is careful. He said he is “right in the middle of this situation.” He cannot detail the mechanics.
That silence itself tells a story. What is at risk is the ability to make critical art about the people and companies reshaping the global economy. If a director of Guadagnino’s stature — “Call Me by Your Name,” “Suspiria,” “Bones and All” — cannot get a straightforward biopic released by a major studio after a corporate partnership, what chance does a smaller filmmaker have?
Guadagnino separated the technology from its handlers. “The issue isn’t artificial intelligence itself,” he said.
He called it a tool for generating products of knowledge or creative works. “From one perspective, it’s a technological gadget — and not a particularly sophisticated one — full of flaws, though it will likely improve over time.” The threat, he implied, is not the machine. It is what people do with it.
And what people with money do to those who tell stories about them. The scientists who developed artificial general intelligence, Guadagnino said, believe that even — and there the quote ended in the available reporting.
The thought hangs unfinished. What do they believe? That the technology is safe?
That it will transform everything? That films like his do not matter? Amazon’s investment in OpenAI was not small.
Fifty billion dollars buys influence. It buys access.
It may also have bought the silence around a movie about the man whose company received that money. Guadagnino is not the first director to face this. He pointed to 2003 and the Reagans miniseries.
Before that there were other projects, other cancellations, other quiet deaths. The pattern is old.
The technology is new. What is genuinely at risk is not one film. It is the principle that a studio can make a movie about a powerful figure without the figure’s corporate partner killing it.
That principle is being tested right now, in the middle of this situation, with Guadagnino unable to say more.
