Artificial had a roster of premier talent and a topical subject—but it no longer fit in with Jeff Bezos’s financial ambitions.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the subject of an unflattering Amazon-produced biopic now in distribution limbo, appears virtually at a conference for Amazon Web Services in April. (Jeff Chiu / AP Photo)
With the news that Amazon MGM Studios won’t be releasing Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, his reportedly scathing biopic of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman starring Andrew Garfield, we are again reminded that, while a movie may cost tens of millions, the ongoing struggle for dominance in Hollywood is a game played in the tens of billions. Currently, Amazon MGM is shopping the movie around for a new buyer, but Netflix, A24, and Focus have all passed.
The film covers the brief ousting of Sam Altman from OpenAI in 2023, and his return to take over the company days later—a restoration that also would turn the major developer of AI technology in the country from a nonprofit into an aggressively for-profit concern. The dramatic interest generated by a strong topical storyline is just one facet of the movie’s potential commercial appeal. In Guadagnino, it boasts an Oscar-nominated director (for his role in helping produce 2017’s Call Me By Your Name). And Artificial’s cast includes talents such as Ike Barinholtz (as Elon Musk), Monica Barbaro, Jason Schwarzman, and Mark Ryall. Yet the film is now in commercial limbo after a few screenings for festival and preview audiences.
No reviews have come out, but word has leaked that it paints a grim and pessimistic portrait of the tech world, and Altman and his arch-rival Musk in particular. An anonymous insider at Amazon told Matt Belloni of Puck, who broke the story, that the final movie took on a “markedly darker tone” that cuts decisively against the broader currents of boosterism extolling the inevitability of AI in both the financial and culture industries.
Amazon MGM Studios, the film and television production arm of Amazon, developed the script and partnered with the creative team every step of the way. Did studio heads simply fail to watch dailies as the film was shot? Belloni, who read the script, calls it a “straightforward indictment of the reckless culture behind the commercialization of artificial intelligence, as well as a drive-by hit on Altman, who is depicted as a liar and a master schemer.” Amazon MGM has only released a milquetoast statement about its abrupt decision to drop the film: “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.”
Given the talent involved, Artificial has the commercial and award-season potential to follow in the footsteps of The Social Network to Oscar renown. That biopic of Mark Zuckerberg made over $224 million in 2010 and won three Oscars after netting eight nominations. But, aside from the film’s prestige credentials, there’s one obvious development that looms over Amazon MGM’s decision: Since work on the film began, Amazon Web Services entered into a $50 billion investment deal with Altman and OpenAI. By contrast, Artificial cost an estimated $40 million to make—which means that even if the film were to be a summer blockbuster, its potential value to Amazon’s streaming platform and film division could never approach what it is investing in OpenAI.
It’s anything but outlandish to suggest that Amazon relinquished distribution of Artificial as a purely economic calculation. The mega=firm’s owner, Jeff Bezos, has notoriously flipped his vanity journalistic property The Washington Post into an outlet of MAGA-friendly agitprop as Amazon Web Services bills the Trump administration for more than $10 billion in government contracts. The web-contracting arm of Amazon is so hungry for federal contracts that it has sued Trump for allegedly steering contracts away from it during his first term, when he regarded Bezos as an ideological enemy. Bezos has since remedied that, and has apparently undertaken the same PR offensive in order to stay close to Altman.
Without any clear explanation from Amazon MGM about its decision to dump Artificial, Bezos’s track record aligns closely with the broader campaign among major entertainment corporations to appease the Trump White House. Back when Skydance was bidding to acquire Viacom and planning to transform its flagship reporting franchise, CBS News, into another Trump-friendly operation, a similar abrupt bit of corporate housekeeping resulted in the cancellation of arch Trump critic Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show. In that case, as in this, it’s crucial to do the simple investment math: After Amazon had elected to invest $50 billion in Altman’s AI empire, a far more modestly budgeted film portraying Altman as a ruthless and truth-averse tech mogul became an unsustainable source of potential public embarrassment.
This is anything but a departure from form in Hollywood—even in the days before the ugly alliance between MAGA and Big Tech. Orson Welles’s 1941 epic Citizen Kane was a thinly veiled and deeply unflattering look at the life of publisher and newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, who also had extensive financial ties to the film industry. After RKO Pictures released the film, Hearst did everything in his power to block its path to popular success. His papers refused to carry ads from any theater showing it, and trashed Welles with red-baiting character assassination. Meanwhile, Hearst used his financial power to try to intimidate major distributors into not carrying Citizen Kane. Welles still got the film released, but diminished box office receipts deprived him of what would have been the biggest financial hit of his career. Over the longer term, of course, the critical reception of Welles’s epic carried the day, and Citizen Kane now routinely lands on critics’ lists of the best films of all time.
Given this sordid history, nothing about Artificial’s erasure should be surprising—except for the scale of the host company’s endangered investments and the broader absorption of entertainment companies into the maw of information-age capitalism. RKO was an old-fashioned stand-alone movie studio. Movies were its main business. When movie studios become just one department of corporate behemoths like Amazon or Apple, they function as but a readily discarded cog in a global conglomerate. Whether Apple has to concentrate on selling phones, or Skydance has to find a path toward paying off the massive debt it incurs on its acquisition binges, the business models of such companies often depend on major government trade assessments and regulatory approvals—and in the Trump era, that means they’re also reliant on the easily bruised and vindictive ego of one man. Movies end up on shelves, disappear from streaming platforms, and get sold off when they complicate the broader financial picture of a modern-day studio.
In 2024, The Apprentice debuted at Cannes to an 11-minute standing ovation. The film is a biopic about the young Donald Trump, played by Sebastian Stan, and his mentor, Roy Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong. The timing of the film’s release would coincide with the heart of the 2024 presidential campaign. The Apprentice portrays Trump’s early success as the result of blackmail and shows Trump raping his then-wife Ivana, which the screenwriter Gabriel Sherman based on Ivana Trump’s own divorce-court testimony. Trump called the filmmakers “human scum” and had his campaign send a cease-and-desist letter to the international consortium of studios that backed the film to prevent it from releasing or marketing the movie in the United States.
The filmmakers were shocked that Trump’s scare tactics worked, and The Apprentice only got a small distributor, Briarcliff Entertainment, to release the film on a limited scale in October 2024. To the extent that any movie could influence the outcome of a presidential election, the machinations of the Trump campaign ensured that The Apprentice was blocked from doing so. Despite Stan’s high commercial standing in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Strong’s breakthrough success on Succession, the movie made only an estimated $16 million of its $17 million budget back. “I understand it from the business perspective of not wanting to have trouble,” the film’s director, Ali Abbassi, said of the industry’s backing away from The Apprentice. “But we’re not in the business of ice creams. We’re not selling shoes. So yeah, it was shocking.”
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To today’s mega-media corporations, however, movies are just ice cream or shoes. These same media companies have backed down from supporting controversial comedians such as Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, whom ABC suspended after a Trump-engineered legal settlement for a monologue about the right-wing reaction to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. In still another Trump-appeasing flourish, Amazon MGM Studios spent $40 million for a hagiographic documentary about Melania Trump. When a $40 million movie is weighed against a multibillion-dollar deal—be it the $10 billion in Trump contracts or the $50 billion in an Altman partnership—creative projects like Artificial are no longer worth defending, while content-challenged ones like Melania get a full-court marketing press; Amazon spent nearly as much on Melania’s market campaign, $35 million, as it did to make the movie itself.
The obvious casualty in such calculations is our culture’s dwindling belief in substantive creative freedom and freedom of speech. Studios often kill projects before they start shooting, but it was formerly the case that a film had to be godawful to keep studios from releasing it after it had been completed. The money spent used to represent a real risk for producers. Now it’s basically a rounding error for companies keen to preserve federal contracts and tech alliances on a cosmic scale.
The corporate culture that disappeared Artificial is the same one that seeks to censor our news, silence critics, and erase inconvenient art as if it never existed. Billionaires have found a way to neuter the protections of the First Amendment and block the free speech of others by simply buying the means by which we speak—social media, news media, film studios, streaming platforms, and networks. The monopoly business models of Bezos, Musk, and Altman have transformed all such outlets of expression into their wholly owned subsidiaries. The modern public square had always operated with a significant share of corporate underwriting, but the Artificial fiasco makes it painfully clear that the idea that it is meaningfully public any longer is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.
Ben SchwartzTwitterBen Schwartz is an Emmy-nominated writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, The New York Times, and many other publications. His Bluesky address is @benschwartz.bluesky.social.