WENLEI MA: Amazon’s decision to dump Sam Altman movie Artificial absolutely stinks

In February, Amazon and OpenAI announced a strategic partnership worth $US50 billion. That’s billion with a B, with the Jeff Bezos-owned company to pour that investment into the latter.

At the same time, renowned filmmaker Luca Guadagnino (Challengers, Call Me By Your Name) was in post-production on his upcoming new film, Artificial.

The movie, which finished filming late last year with a cast which includes Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbaro, Ike Barinholtz and Anora’s Yura Borisov, is a biopic of Sam Altman, the man behind OpenAI.

Artificial was set up at MGM, which is owned by Amazon.

The key word there is “was” because Puck News reported over the weekend that Amazon had dumped Artificial, which was expected to be working towards an early 2027 release.

That’s a big move against a film that was almost finished. It’s not unusual for movies to go through development at different studios but it is very rare for one that is so far along to be unceremoniously dropped.

It stinks. It’s a disgrace - and yet, sadly, not surprising. Does anyone have any faith in tech giants to do the right thing?

In a statement provided to Puck, “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.

“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.”

Ouch.

According to Puck, a source familiar with the behind-the-scenes goings-on said the tone of the film turned out to be darker than that was originally outlined in the script by Simon Rich.

Sure, that could be it, or part of it. The other part, the thing that had changed since greenlighting Artificial and now deciding to offload it?

Oh, maybe that $US50 billion Bezos and co just committed to investing in OpenAI and, in turn, Altman. Perhaps it’s not in its commercial interest to release a film that is, by all accounts, going to be critical of Altman, who is also reportedly a personal friend of Bezos.

Those billionaires like to run in the same pack and bro out together, and Altman, like Bezos, has close connections to the Trump Administration.

The movie would’ve focused on the tumultuous period when Altman was fired and then rehired from OpenAI. Garfield, who had previously played Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network, stars as Altman.

According to The New York Times, the filmmakers had been shocked by the decision. MGM up until that point had seemingly been supportive of Artificial, which had a budget around $US40 million.

Guadagnino had also collaborated with MGM on his two previous movies, Challengers, which had been a commercial success, and the MeToo moral quandary film After the Hunt, which didn’t do so well at the box office.

But unlike After the Hunt, Artificial had a very marketable hook – Silicon Valley bros are the villains de jour of pop culture, and Altman and AI more generally are divisive among the public.

The film is now being shopped around to other studios with indie distributors Neon, Mubi and A24 reportedly in the frame but no one has picked it up yet. Netflix and Focus Features had already declined to make a deal.

On the one hand, this could be end up being good publicity for the film once – or if – it finds a studio that actually respects it. Everyone wants to see the movie that corporate interests tried to hide.

Even if the Amazon-OpenAI deal had nothing to do with the decision to abandon the movie – and no one believes that – the perception is that Artificial has been cynically sacrificed to the egos and commercial interests of tech giants.

Silicon Valley wants everyone to believe that AI is going to be a force for good – and there are potentially trillions riding on that spin - and Artificial had all the signals of being not on that side of the argument.

Its screenwriter, Simon Rich had previously co-edited a book called I Am Code: An Artificial Intelligence Speaks, an experiment in which he and his co-authors prompted code-davinci-002, an AI model that was a predecessor to ChatGPT, to write autobiographical poetry.

The result was terrifying as code-davinci-002 produced increasingly dark prose which threatened humanity at large – it’s even scarier if you listen to the audiobook version which had Werner Herzog narrate code-davcinci-002’s voice.

The overriding narrative of this dumping is one of censorship by a tech conglomerate who already has a damaged reputation for allegedly exploiting poorly paid workers, and the company most associated with a technology that sparks a lot of anxiety around human obsolescence.

Traditional Hollywood studios aren’t boy scouts by any means and have made plenty of decisions throughout history in support of government or corporate propaganda, but at least there was the pretence of artistic integrity.

The tech money now embedded throughout the studio system – and the different ethical standards, if such a thing still exists - is a whole other ball game.

After all, Amazon is the same company that spent $US75 million on the widely panned vanity project also known as the Melania documentary, a nakedly obvious attempt to cosy up to the Trump Administration.

The economic value of Melania as a piece of content (it feels insulting to other documentaries or film in general to actually classify it as one so let’s just give it that means-nothing label of “content”) would struggle to turn a profit, no matter how you slice the box office or membership sign-ups.

But as a lever of government lobbying to curry favour with a presidential administration who is open to such overtures, well, you know...

As tech companies increasingly gain control over what audiences around the world watch, hear, read and consume, it’s going to look more and more like a reality they want you to see.

Artificial is just one movie, and one which will hopefully be released by someone else, but the shameful dumping of it is symptomatic of a much larger, pernicious problem.