In June, Amazon MGM Studios walked away from a film by Luca Guadagnino that it had been due to release. On 11 October that film, Artificial, screens as a Gala at the BFI London Film Festival with a different distributor's name on it and an awards campaign reportedly being planned. The story on screen is about who controls OpenAI. The story around it is about who is willing to release a film on that subject.
What Amazon had to weigh
Artificial dramatises the rise of OpenAI and the five days in November 2023 when its board dismissed Sam Altman as chief executive and then took him back. Andrew Garfield plays Altman. The Guardian's review describes the film's view of him without hedging: 'an amoral manipulator who might be dead inside'.
The same review notes that Jeff Bezos's company has a $50bn investment in OpenAI. Amazon has not said that this is why it dropped the film, and the link remains an inference. It is an easy one to draw: a studio whose parent is an investor was being asked to market an unflattering portrait of the investment.
What Neon bought
Neon, the distributor of Sean Baker's Anora, picked the film up. The fit is close. Yura Borisov, who plays OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, received an Academy Award nomination for his supporting role in Anora. Neon now reportedly plans to campaign for him as lead actor, for Garfield in the supporting category, and for the film across the board, best picture included.
The calendar follows the campaign. The world premiere was at the New York Film Festival on 5 October. London comes six days later. According to the Guardian, the film opens in the United States on 25 December and in the United Kingdom on 27 January.
A crowded season
Guadagnino's film does not arrive alone. The Guardian calls this 'tech oligarch season at the movies', with films about Elon Musk, Elizabeth Holmes and Mark Zuckerberg also due over the next few months. The paper's critic, Owen Myers, points out that on the day Artificial premiered, Vanity Fair released a cover story on Altman with portraits by Annie Leibovitz.
That pairing says a good deal about the market the film enters. The same man is, in the same week, the subject of a glossy magazine cover and of a satire. Myers argues that the film has little to say about the world, 'glossy magazines included', that has welcomed the technology elite with open arms.
What the critics are pricing in
The first reviews lean favourable, and they agree on the acting. In Variety the film has been called Guadagnino's best in a decade, and Borisov's work possibly the performance of the year. The reservations are also consistent: IndieWire's David Ehrlich finds the script blunt, and Screen International's Tim Grierson argues that it registers the anxiety around AI without really examining those who hold the power.
Guadagnino has said that the technology interests him less than the people who own it, a technological oligarchy with radical control over how society is organised. Whether the film examines that ownership or only disapproves of it is the question the London screening will test.
What to watch after the Gala
Three things will show what Artificial is worth beyond its opening week. The first is whether the awards campaign holds its shape, with Borisov as the lead. The second is whether the film's subjects respond, and how. The third is the precedent: one studio dropped the film, another distributor took it, and the result is being positioned for the season's main prizes. If that works, the next film about a powerful company may find its backers sooner.
The BFI London Film Festival runs from 7 to 18 October 2026.
Image: Ilya Sutskever and Sam Altman, 2023. Photo: Eladkarmel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.