The company that spent five days trying to decide who should run OpenAI is now the subject of a Luca Guadagnino film, and the film nearly vanished before anyone outside a screening room could see it. Artificial casts Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, the OpenAI chief executive the board fired and then took back, and it reaches theaters from Neon after Amazon MGM Studios, its original backer, let it go.

The story behind the release is almost as pointed as the one on screen. Amazon dropped the film several days after signing a multibillion-dollar agreement with OpenAI, saying the picture would do better at another studio. Altman has denied any role in that decision. Netflix, Focus Features and Warner Bros. were among the buyers who screened it and passed. Neon took worldwide rights.

What Artificial is, and who plays whom

Artificial is a comedy-drama about the people who built OpenAI and then fought over it. Neon’s official synopsis starts with a research breakthrough by Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton, follows a chance meeting between Sutskever and Altman, and arrives at the founding of the company with money from Elon Musk and help from engineer Mira Murati. The screenplay is by Simon Rich, the former Saturday Night Live writer, and Guadagnino directs and produces.

Two of the leads arrive from the same Oscar race. Yura Borisov, Oscar-nominated for Anora, plays Sutskever, the chief scientist who voted to remove Altman. Monica Barbaro, nominated for playing Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown, plays Murati, the chief technology officer who briefly became interim CEO. Cooper Hoffman plays co-founder Greg Brockman. Ike Barinholtz plays Musk. Mark Rylance plays Hinton, the scientist who later left Google to warn about the field he helped start. Jason Schwartzman, Zosia Mamet as board member Tasha McCauley, Chris O’Dowd, Billie Lourd and Cooper Koch fill out the ensemble.

Then there is Garfield. He played Eduardo Saverin, the co-founder who gets cut out, in David Fincher‘s The Social Network. Sixteen years later he plays the founder at the center of the fight.

That casting is the first argument the film makes before a single review lands. Garfield’s best-known screen roles are men audiences root for: a conscientious objector in Hacksaw Ridge, a songwriter racing a deadline in tick, tick… BOOM!, a gentle Spider-Man. Putting that face on a tech executive whose public persona is famously hard to read is a choice about likeability, and about how far it can be trusted.

A wedding conversation that became a screenplay

Rich did not come to the project as a tech insider. According to the film’s production history, the idea came out of a conversation at a wedding with Dan Selsam, an OpenAI researcher. Rich pitched Amazon MGM in early 2024 and finished a first draft within months, before the studio brought Guadagnino in and the cast assembled through the following summer.

Shooting began in San Francisco’s Mission Dolores Park and moved to Turin. The street shoot produced its own small story. Altman has said he never met Garfield but once walked into the set outside his own house, saw a man dressed exactly like him with the same backpack, and the two waved at each other. Garfield later disputed the wave.

The production team follows Guadagnino’s recent pattern. Jonathan Anderson, the fashion designer who dressed Challengers and Queer, handles costumes, and he and Guadagnino reportedly appear in the film as two cameramen. Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz wrote the music and original songs. Malik Hassan Sayeed shot it, and Marco Costa, Guadagnino’s regular editor, cut it.

The director arrives with momentum and a split record. Challengers became a crossover hit; Queer and After the Hunt, the last of them also made for Amazon MGM, drew more divided responses. Artificial is his first film about living people this famous, and it lands while those people are still running the companies in question.

Critics agree on Garfield and argue about the bite

The film had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival, at Alice Tully Hall, and then played a gala at the BFI London Film Festival. Nobody at MCM has seen it yet, so the assessments here belong to the critics who have.

On the central performance the reviews converge. Writing for Screen Daily, Tim Grierson called Garfield’s portrayal “scathingly slimy” and argued that “the key to Garfield’s performance is how he depicts Altman’s ingenious spinelessness.” At The Film Stage, Luke Hicks wrote that Garfield “delivers a cold, robotic Sam Altman so convincing it’s baffling,” and singled out Barbaro as giving “one of the best performances” in the film.

On the script, they split. Grierson’s headline called the film a “surprisingly toothless AI thriller,” and he wrote that Rich’s screenplay “fails to offer any real insight into the deeply flawed humans” behind the technology. Hicks found the writing “dry and curiously void of the juicy detail or evidence,” and described the film as “less plot-centric and more a series of conversations behind closed doors in San Francisco,” organized in chapters that jump a year or four at a time. The Guardian’s review, by Owen Myers, called it a “muddled tech satire.”

The first reactions out of New York ran hotter. Critic Joshua Rothkopf posted that “Luca Guadagnino just ate Sorkin’s lunch,” and The Playlist’s Gregory Ellwood called it “a sledgehammer.” Metacritic listed a score of 75 from its first 19 reviews, in the “generally favorable” band.

Altman himself weighed in before the premiere. Speaking at OpenAI’s developer conference about the trailer, he said it “looks like an awful movie,” added that he supports people’s creativity, and conceded one point to Garfield: “He did walk like me.” His summary of the film’s aims was blunt: “I don’t think they’re going for accuracy.”

The five days the film is built around

The real event at the center of Artificial is short and well documented. OpenAI’s nonprofit board, a structure designed to put safety ahead of profit, removed Altman and said he had not been consistently candid with it. Within days, most of the company’s staff signed a letter threatening to leave, Microsoft offered to hire Altman and anyone who followed him, and Sutskever publicly said he regretted his part. Altman returned as CEO. Most of the board that fired him did not stay.

That sequence is what gives the film its comic engine. A board built to stop one person turned out unable to do it, and the people involved went back to work. Rich, a comedy writer by trade, has material that needs no exaggeration to look absurd, and Guadagnino has a cast of performers playing people whose quotes are still being parsed in business news.

The question the reviews keep circling is whether a film can be fair to people who are still in charge of the technology it describes. Grierson’s complaint that the characters “seem less compelling than the very real dangers they’ve unleashed” points at that problem directly. A biopic usually works with a finished life. This one works with a story whose ending has not been written, and whose subjects can answer back from a conference stage.

Quick answers: Artificial

Is Artificial a true story? It is based on real people and on OpenAI’s founding and the board’s firing and rehiring of Sam Altman. It is a dramatization written by Simon Rich, and Altman has said the film is not accurate.

Who plays Sam Altman? Andrew Garfield. Yura Borisov plays Ilya Sutskever, Monica Barbaro plays Mira Murati, Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk and Mark Rylance plays Geoffrey Hinton.

Who directed Artificial? Luca Guadagnino, director of Call Me by Your Name, Challengers and Queer.

Where can I watch Artificial? It is a theatrical release only, through Neon; no streaming date has been announced. No streaming date has been announced.

Release date and runtime

Artificial opens in US theaters on December 25, 2026, from Neon, with a wider expansion expected in early 2027. Neon releases it in the United Kingdom and Ireland on January 22, 2027. The film runs 140 minutes.

Amazon’s stated reason for walking away was that someone else could sell the film better. Neon is now testing that claim on the biggest moviegoing day of the year, with a picture about a company that signed a $50 billion deal with the studio that let it go.