First 'Artificial' trailer: Andrew Garfield's Sam Altman opens on Christmas Day

Neon has released the first teaser for 'Artificial', Luca Guadagnino's film about the five days in November 2023 when OpenAI's board fired Sam Altman and then took him back. Andrew Garfield plays Altman, and the film opens in US theaters on December 25, after a world premiere in the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival on October 5 and a gala screening at the BFI London Film Festival on October 11.

The teaser is almost entirely Garfield in voice-over, walking through a mansion-like office. "We have created a machine that will solve the world's problems," he says, then: "We opened Pandora's Box together. The future is inevitable — countries will fall, industries are gonna collapse." He enters a futuristic room whose blue-tinted glass walls are lined with guns, takes out his laptop and adds, "We get to be the ones who get to shepherd people in to this new world." Per Deadline's description of the footage, that is the whole of the teaser: no board scene, no Musk, no product.

#Who plays whom

Jason Schwartzman, Chris O'Dowd, Billie Lourd, Zosia Mamet and Cooper Koch round out the ensemble. The script is by SNL alum Simon Rich, who also produces alongside David Heyman, Jeffrey Clifford, Jennifer Fox and Guadagnino. Damon Albarn wrote the score and original songs — his first collaboration with Guadagnino. Malik Hassan Sayeed shot it, the budget was roughly $40 million, and the runtime is 140 minutes. Principal photography started at San Francisco's Dolores Park on July 30, 2025 and continued in Turin.

#The film nobody wanted to distribute

The more interesting story is how a nearly finished Guadagnino film with that cast ended up at Neon. Amazon MGM Studios developed and financed 'Artificial', then dropped it in June — after Amazon struck a partnership with OpenAI to expand its use of AWS and build custom models, a deal that included a $50 billion investment on Amazon's part. Amazon's statement cited "the utmost respect and admiration" for Guadagnino and said the film "will be better served if it were released by a different studio." The New York Times reported Guadagnino was shocked by the decision.

CAA then screened it for A24, Focus Features, Netflix, Warner Bros. Clockwork, Mubi and Neon. Everyone but Neon passed. Page Six Hollywood reported Neon took worldwide rights only with no minimum guarantee attached.

The reason for all those passes is genuinely contested. Variety reported in June, citing people who had seen it, that earlier test screenings "went down very positively" and that Altman and Musk are the least sympathetic characters in the film — the reading that fed the conspiracy theories. A month later, buyers who attended the CAA screenings told Screen Daily the opposite: "The purported controversy had no impact," one said, calling the film "dull, ponderous and another misfire from Luca" and pointing to poor test scores. Others called it mediocre and said it added nothing new to the saga. People close to Neon, meanwhile, are described as bullish on its awards prospects.

#Why it matters

This is the first mainstream theatrical dramatization of a frontier-lab governance crisis — the episode that decided who controls the company now shipping GPT-6, told as a Christmas Day awards-season release rather than a documentary. The distribution fight around it is arguably the better parable: a studio owned by one of OpenAI's largest investors and infrastructure partners walked away from a finished, unsympathetic portrait of OpenAI's CEO, and the industry is still arguing over whether that was commerce, cowardice or just a bad movie. NYFF on October 5 is the first chance for anyone outside the buyer screenings to say which.