After Other Studios Bend the Knee, Neon Acquires Luca Guadagnino’s Sam Altman Teardown

Neon, the studio behind best picture winner Anora, has officially acquired global rights to Luca Guadagnino’s film Artificial, per Deadline. Written by Saturday Night Live alum Simon Rich, the film tells the story of the abrupt firing and rehiring of Sam Altman as CEO of OpenAI. The film, which stars Andrew Garfield as Altman, will be out in time for this year’s Oscar race. Amazon unceremoniously dropped the film after the megacorporation invested $50 billion in Altman’s artificial intelligence company. Following the cancellation, Guadagnino shopped the film around to several other distributors, including Focus Features, Warner Bros., A24 and Netflix, all of which passed on the project. Part of the issue is that the film reportedly depicts Altman as a pathological liar and Elon Musk, played by Emmy nominee Ike Barinholtz, in a “highly antipathetic” rendering, per Variety. In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, Amazon didn’t cite its relationship with Altman or OpenAI as a reason for the sudden move.“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. “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.”Neon has made quite a splash in the film world in the last few years, winning big at the Academy Awards with Anora as well as getting the rights to seven Palme d’Or winners at the Cannes Film Festival, including Parasite, Titane, Triangle of Sadness, and Anatomy of a Fall. The film also stars Anora actor Yura Borisov, Monica Barbaro, Cooper Hoffman, Cooper Koch, Billie Lourd, Zosia Mamet, Chris O’Down and Mark Rylance. It would be the Call me By Your Name and Queer director’s first film since his 2025 cancel culture drama After the Hunt opened to ho-hum reviews.