Luca Guadagnino’s Sam Altman Movie Finally Finds a Home

After a wild few weeks of updates, Luca Guadagnino’s new movie Artificial has finally found a home. Earlier this week, Neon officially announced that it has acquired the distribution rights to Artificial, Guadagnino’s upcoming film centered around controversial OpenAI founder Sam Altman.

Artificial made headlines last month after Amazon MGM Studios announced that they were dropping the nearly-finished film. The studio had previously been attached to Artificial after already distributing several of Guadagnino’s other films, including Challengers and most recently 2025’s After the Hunt. The decision to drop the film came just days after Amazon signed a $50 billion deal with OpenAI to launch a “multi-year strategic partnership to accelerate AI innovation for enterprises, startups, and end consumers around the world.” Prior to that deal, the real-life Altman had already had a relationship with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, even attending his wedding in Italy last year.

“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 at the time. “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.”

While a specific reason for the drop wasn’t cited, some had interpreted it to be a result of Artificial‘s apparent “unsympathetic” portrayal of Altman (played by Andrew Garfield) and Elon Musk (played by Ike Barinholtz). According to a report from The New York Times, Amazon had previously been supportive of the project, spending around $40 million on it. The studio had already testing it in multiple markets, with plans to zero in on a release date and potentially premiere it at the 2027 SXSW Film & TV Festival.

In the days after the news, a screening was reportedly held for other distributors, with Neon, Warner Bros. Clockwork, Netflix, Focus Features, and A24 being among the options. By June 21st, it was reported that Neon was the only studio still interested, with Mubi also potentially throwing its hat into the ring. Ultimately, Neon landed on the deal by the end of June, and is apparently making plans to release the film during the 2026 awards season.

What Is Artificial About?

Artificial explores Altman’s messy tenure as the co-founder and chief executive of OpenAI, and specifically the time when he was was fired and quickly rehired in the span of less than a week in November of 2023. At the time, the firing was contributed to company-wide concerns about the misuse of OpenAI’s technology, as well as allegations that Altman was “psychologically abusive”.

In addition to Garfield and Barinholtz, Artificial also stars Monica Barbaro as OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Yura Borisov as co-founder and chief scientific officier Ilya Sutskever, Mark Rylance as Geoffrey Hinton, and Cooper Hoffman as board chairman Greg Brockman. The cast of the film also includes Jason Schwartzman, Zosia Mamet, Chris O’Dowd, Cooper Koch, Billie Lourd, Will Angus, Thaddea Graham, Nicholas Hamilton, Angus Imrie, and Will Price.

(featured image: Kate Green/Getty Images for BFI)

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