Hollywood is bending the knee to OpenAI

Netflix, A24, Focus Features, and Warner Bros.’ Clockwork have all reportedly decided to pass on picking up Artificial — director Luca Guadagnino’s new biographical drama about OpenAI cofounder / CEO Sam Altman — for distribution deals. And while Neon and Mubi are still said to be interested in the film, this situation makes it seem like Hollywood no longer has the courage to tell critical stories about Big Tech. Postproduction on Artificial was nearly finished when Amazon MGM unexpectedly announced last week that it no longer plans to distribute the film. The news came as a surprise given how far along the movie was and reports that Amazon initially intended to give it a short, Oscar-qualifying theatrical run some time later this year. Artificial was also reportedly scheduled for a wider release in early 2027 and a showing at the SXSW Film & TV Festival, but those plans are now dead in the water. Though Amazon hasn’t gone into detail about why it dropped Artificial, the company told Deadline that it felt the film would be “better served if it were released by a different studio.” While Neon or Mubi could ultimately be better homes for the project, Amazon’s decision follows its $50 billion investment into OpenAI from earlier this year. Amazon has made abundantly clear that it wants to be in the AI business in a big way, and it’s easy to understand why the company might be reluctant to release a film that portrays an AI executive in a negative light. But the larger issue is the fact that Amazon probably won’t be the last studio to move this way. Written by An American Pickle scribe Simon Rich, Artificial chronicles the tumultuous period in 2023 when Altman was fired from OpenAI and subsequently rehired just a few days later. The drama began with OpenAI’s board of directors alleging that Altman was hindering “its ability to exercise its responsibilities” by not being “consistently candid in his communications” (corporate PR speak for “lying.”) Shortly after, Altman was set to join Microsoft and hundreds of OpenAI employees signed an open letter threatening to quit if he wasn’t reinstated as CEO. Things concluded with Altman returning to OpenAI and installing a fresh board of directors almost entirely full of new faces. On paper at least, the entire saga reads like a drama that could make for a gripping and timely examination of one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful executives. After projects like The Audacity, Mountainhead, The Dropout, and Aaron Sorkin’s forthcoming The Social Reckoning, Artificial feels like the sort of film that aligns with Hollywood’s recent fixation on stories about tech titans. And in this era of generative AI being shoved down everyone’s throats, audiences are primed for a star-studded feature focused on some of the people responsible for the technology’s omnipresence. What’s truly alarming, though, is how many other studios have chosen to follow Amazon’s lead. Yesterday, Google’s DeepMind AI arm announced that it has struck a $75 million, multiyear “research partnership” deal with A24 to develop a host of filmmaking technologies like a new storyboarding application. The companies have said that the deal won’t involve Google gaining access to A24’s library of film and TV projects, but they have yet to make clear the extent to which these tools will be used by the studio. That lack of clarity is part of why people have already begun to take a dimmer view of A24. Just last week, the studio was riding high on the breakout success of Backrooms, but after posting the trailer for Jesse Eisenberg’s upcoming musical The Debut, A24 has been met with a wave of scathing online criticism specifically because of the DeepMind collaboration. The chances of A24 and Google’s partnership dissolving feel unlikely because the production company is far from the only studio that has decided to get into bed with gen AI. Disney has struck (failed) AI deals of its own, Netflix has absorbed AI startups, and Paramount Skydance executives have signaled that they see the technology as being key to boosting productivity. All of this paints a very bleak picture of Hollywood’s possible future — one in which movies and series are produced with gen AI by studios that refuse to say anything truly insightful or negative about the technology or its creators. Projects like The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist have already shown us how uninspired and soulless films about AI can be when they’re crafted by people who seem beholden to tech executives. And what we’re looking at now is a potential age of Hollywood giants doing everything in their power to stay in Silicon Valley’s good graces. Operating that way — from a place of cowardice in service of tech-driven profits — is antithetical to producing good art.