Neon has acquired worldwide rights to Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial after Amazon MGM Studios off-loaded the film about OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman film earlier in June. Neon sources said on Tuesday night: “Artificial will compete in this year’s Oscar race.”
The deal was confirmed after multiple other studios and distributors passed on the opportunity to add it to their pipelines against a backdrop of mounting concern over Big Tech’s incursion into Hollywood.
Amazon MGM Studios clearly deemed the film too hot to handle after head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios Mike Hopkins reportedly thought it had turned out to be darker than he initially believed and informed Guadagnino of his decision.
Four months prior, parent company Amazon announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI to accelerate AI innovation and pledged to invest $50bn in the company. Announcing its decision to drop Artificial, Amazon MGM Studios said at the time it believed the film would be “better served if it were released by a different studio”.
Artificial stars Andrew Garfield as Altman and focuses on the period in late 2023 when the entrepreneur was first fired then rehired by the OpenAI board in short order after internal concern over a shift from the company’s nonprofit origins towards a more commercial structure.
There had also been anxiety among leadership over an alleged lack of trust and safety guardrails at the Silicon Valley start-up behind ChatGPT and the discontinued Sora app.
CAA Media Finance and Amazon MGM Studios negotiated the sale with Alison Cohen for Neon. On Tuesday Neon said the acquisition underlined its “commitment to partnering with visionary filmmakers, and bringing ambitious cinema to audiences around the world”.
While the film has not been seen outside a gaggle of filmmakers, Hollywood executives and representatives, what seems likely is that Artificial marks the arrival of a timely, controversial and sharp-elbowed awards contender that will make noise in the months ahead and have fall festival heads clamouring to be first in line to provide a prestigious world premiere berth.
Guadagnino’s films tend to world-premiere in Venice like last year’s After The Hunt and recent works such as Queer and Bones And All.
The Artificial cast includes Yura Borisov from Anora as Ilya Sutskever, Monica Barbaro from A Complete Unknown as Mira Murati, and winner Mark Rylance as Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton. Ike Barinholtz, Jason Schwartzman, Zosia Mamet, Cooper Hoffman, Chris O’Dowd, Cooper Koch, and Billie Lourd round out the cast.
SNL alumnus Simon Rich wrote the screenplay and Rich and Guadagnino produced alongside Heyday Films’ David Heyman and Jeffrey Clifford, and Jennifer Fox. Artificial shot in San Francisco and Italy.
No comments yet