After being dropped by Amazon MGM Studios, Luca Guadagnino’s OpenAI movie Artificial is in advanced talks to find a new home with Neon, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. If the deal makes, this will end nearly two weeks of speculation about the film’s fate.
Amazon dropped the film in mid-June, months after the tech giant announced a $50 billion investment in OpenAI. The partnership also sees OpenAI using Amazon Web Services infrastructure.
“We have the utmost respect and admiration for Luca Guadagnino as an award-winning filmmaker — not to mention a longstanding relationship that we hope to continue,” a spokesperson for Amazon told THR at the time. “We believe that Artificial will be better served if it were released by a different studio and are working closely with the filmmaking team to find the film a new home.” The decision to drop Artificial came from Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios chief Mike Hopkins.
Artificial takes place during the tumultuous period at the artificial intelligence company OpenAI in 2023 that saw CEO Sam Altman fired and rehired in a matter of days. The cast includes Andrew Garfield as Atlman, Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati and Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever.
Simon Rich wrote the screenplay. Producers include Heyday Films’ David Heyman and Jeffrey Clifford, along with Jennifer Fox. CAA Media Finance negotiated the deal on behalf of the filmmakers.
The move comes after studios like Warner Bros., Netflix and Focus passed on the film, which is nearly complete. Last week, sources told THR that studios were reluctant to pick up the film for a variety of reasons, including political concerns. International darling Mubi and eventual winner Neon became the frontrunners for the movie.
For his part, Guadagnino told Italian television last week, “What matters most to me are the people. It is completely changing the face — not just of society in terms of consumption and how we relate to these tools, but the very face of the identity of a place like the United States and the entire world — with the rise of this small oligarchy that wields truly radical control.”
Puck first reported the news.
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