June 30, 2026
The film about AI that Amazon passive-aggressively tried to kill has new life. Director Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial has reportedly found a new home at Neon, the film distribution company behind Oscar-winning films, including Parasite, Anora, and I, Tonya. Through a biopic lens, Artificial dives into the details behind the firing of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and delves into the profiles of the executives and AI leaders around him who have frequently been quoted as referring to Altman as less than trustworthy.
All systems were go on the film at Amazon Studios. However, because Amazon canceled the film not long after investing $50 billion in OpenAI in February, there has been wide speculation that the deal may have been the death knell for the OpenAI-critical film ever being released by Amazon. The e-commerce giant didn’t give a specific reason for canceling the film’s distribution, opting instead to state, “Artificial will be better served if it were released by a different studio and [we] are working closely with the filmmaking team to find the film a new home.”
The rumors of where Guadagnino’s film would eventually land have fueled conversations about how much influence Big Tech has on Hollywood as the relationship, either via ownership or backend deals, becomes increasingly close. The question some have been openly asking is, is Hollywood scared of Big Tech? Fittingly, Neon, the would-be savior of the film, as reported by Matt Belloni, is a distribution company based in New York City, far away from Silicon Valley and unencumbered by the Big Tech politics currently squeezing a number of major Hollywood studios.
Aside from its distance from Hollywood proper, Neon also makes sense as a destination for other reasons. The company has generally been seen as a bastion of counter-mainstream stories that speak truth to power or focus on historical injustices.
Earlier this month, during an interview with the Producers Guild of America, Neon founder and CEO Tom Quinn outlined the company’s dedication to this ethos. “We truly believe that artistic merit and cultural relevance should and must exist in equal measure in everything that we do. One is not distinct from the other. And to quote one of my favorite directors, Celine Sciamma, ‘If your art isn’t political, is it art?’ And I would argue it’s not,” said Quinn. “And I’m not saying that 100% of the time do we achieve this at Neon, but I can assure you that we try very hard and make it our mission to support films that really do have something to say, that have a point of view and have a purpose, and it’s very consistent across our catalog.”
Side Note: This question of art being inherently political is, for many, at the heart of the debate around using AI to create art, films, music, etc. The notion being that if Big Tech companies control the means of creation, that is, generative AI software, and have terms and conditions prohibiting certain kinds of speech, ideas, or political stances, will “all” kinds of AI-generated art have the ability to be freely distributed (outside of open source AI solutions) beyond the control of Big Tech? One could argue that the Amazon episode with the film Artificial may be the first example of Big Tech normalizing the censoring Hollywood.
Therefore, as OpenAI and Altman remain controversial in terms of human ethics, the environment, unemployment concerns, and the overall safety of society versus AI’s evolution in the hands of Altman, Neon could be the perfect place for the film to find a home. Artificial stars Andrew Garfield (Spider-Man, The Social Network) as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Ike Barinholtz (Suicide Squad) as Elon Musk, Monica Barbaro (Top Gun: Maverick) as Mira Murati, and Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies) as Geoffrey Hinton. Neon has yet to confirm the report, and a release date hasn’t been announced, but we should have word of both relatively soon since the film is already completed.
