Luca Guadagnino says it wasn’t surprising Amazon MGM dropped his nearly-finished Sam Altman movie Artificial shortly after Amazon announced a $50 billion investment in OpenAI.
“I can’t say much because we are right in the middle of this situation,” Guadagnino told Italian television, “[but] these are industrial policies that are certainly not new.”
Speaking to news show Otto e mezzo on Italian network La7, Guadagnino cited an incident from 2003 when CBS canceled the broadcast of The Regans, a miniseries about President Ronald Reagan and his family, starring Josh Brolin and Judy Davis, following a conservative backlash. (The series eventually aired on CBS’s sister network Showtime.)
The Italian director could have mentioned a more recent example, Ali Abbasi’s 2024 Donald Trump movie The Apprentice, which premiered to acclaim in Cannes but was blackballed by studio and independent distributors, before finally landing with Tom Ortenberg’s indie outfit Briarcliff Entertainment.
Neither of those, however, is a direct comp to the Artificial situation. Amazon pulled out of Guadagnino’s film shortly after announcing its $50 billion strategic partnership with OpenAI, a deal that will see the two companies jointly build custom AI models for Amazon’s internal engineering teams. When Amazon dropped it, Guadagnino’s $40 million Social Network-esque feature was nearly finished and was expected to premiere at one of the fall film festivals.
It is now in limbo. CAA Media Finance, which represents Guadagnino, has been screening the movie to potential buyers but many of the usual suspects —Netflix, Focus Features, Warner Bros.’ Clockwork and A24 —have reportedly passed. At this stage, Mubi, which released Guadagnino’s Queer, is considered the most likely buyer.
While he didn’t speak directly to the Amazon MGM situation, Guadagnino did issue a warning about AI, or rather, the companies that control the technology and its use worldwide.
“To me, the issue isn’t artificial intelligence itself,” the director said, “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.”