Amazon’s decision to keep Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial” off its release calendar is starting to make a lot more sense. The comedy-drama, which dramatizes the founding of OpenAI and the ideological split that tore its original board apart, has been sitting in limbo for months. Now, with a theatrical date of December 25, 2026, and a TMDb rating of 0/10, the film’s withering reception among early viewers is the real story.
A Brutal Portrait of the AI Boom’s Founding Fathers
“Artificial” is not a flattering movie. Andrew Garfield plays Sam Altman, the man who turned a nonprofit research lab into a commercial juggernaut. Yura Borisov is Ilya Sutskever, the computer scientist whose breakthrough with AI pioneer Professor Geoffrey Hinton sets the whole race in motion. According to the film’s official overview, the two men become certain their work will alter humanity forever, prompting Silicon Valley’s most prominent figures to scramble for a piece of their vision. Years later, a chance meeting with Altman leads Sutskever and a group of idealistic entrepreneurs to create OpenAI, with backing from Elon Musk and assistance from engineer Mira Murati.
That is the setup. What follows, by all accounts, is a withering depiction of how those ideals curdled. Guadagnino, working from a screenplay that has been kept under tight wraps, reportedly spends much of the 140-minute runtime watching his characters congratulate themselves in glass-walled conference rooms while the stakes of their work grow ever more terrifying. The film’s genre is listed as comedy and drama, and the comedy is apparently of the excruciating variety - the kind that comes from watching smart people make catastrophic decisions for reasons they mistake as noble.
Cooper Hoffman plays Greg Brockman, Monica Barbaro is Mira Murati, and Jason Schwartzman, Cooper Koch, Billie Lourd, and Zosia Mamet round out the ensemble. The cast is stacked. The material, according to those who have seen it, is merciless.
Why Amazon Balked
Amazon’s reluctance to release “Artificial” was never officially explained. The film was finished, the release date was set, and then nothing. Now the picture is clearer: a movie this unsparing about the most powerful figures in tech is not an easy corporate asset. Amazon, like many studios, has business relationships across Silicon Valley. Releasing a film that portrays OpenAI’s founding as a slow-motion ethical collapse is not the kind of thing that makes for comfortable board meetings.
The 0/10 TMDb rating is not a measure of quality - it reflects a title that has not yet been widely seen or rated by users. But the fact that “Artificial” is arriving in theaters at all, rather than being buried on a streaming shelf, suggests someone at the studio decided the film was too sharp to waste. Or perhaps too dangerous to keep quiet.
A Christmas Release With an Edge
December 25 is traditionally a date for family-friendly fare and prestige pictures designed to warm hearts. “Artificial” does neither. It is a film about the people who built the systems now reshaping daily life, and it argues - apparently without much subtlety - that they did not fully understand what they were doing. Guadagnino, who has never been a director to soften a landing, reportedly treats his subjects with the same formal elegance he brought to “Call Me by Your Name” and “Challengers,” but the warmth is gone. What remains is a cold, funny, deeply unsettling look at how the future got sold.
Garfield’s Altman is said to be a study in calibrated ambition, a man who speaks in mission statements and believes every word until he doesn’t. Borisov’s Sutskever is the film’s conscience, or what passes for one, a scientist who realizes too late that the breakthrough he wanted is being weaponized into a product. The supporting cast, particularly Barbaro as Murati and Hoffman as Brockman, fills out a world where everyone is smart and no one is wise.
The film’s runtime of 140 minutes is long for a comedy, even a dark one. But “Artificial” is not really a comedy in the traditional sense. It is a drama with jokes that land like indictments. Whether audiences will turn out for a movie that tells them the architects of their digital lives are, at best, well-meaning disasters remains to be seen. What is already clear is why Amazon hesitated. This is not a film that flatters anyone. It just withers.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
