The Sam Altman film Amazon was scared to release is beating Sorkin at his own game
Aaron Sorkin took aim at Facebook a decade after everyone else did. Guadagnino took aim at Amazon's $50 billion business partner, and Amazon showed him the door.
Luca Guadagnino's Artificial had its UK premiere at the London Film Festival on Sunday 11 October, with Andrew Garfield and Yura Borisov on stage at the Royal Festival Hall. That came six days after its world premiere at the New York Film Festival. It now sits at 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, the best score of Guadagnino's career, and Garfield's Sam Altman has pushed him to the front of the Best Supporting Actor conversation.
Not bad for a film its own studio threw out in June.
The studio with a stake in OpenAI
Artificial was developed and made at Amazon MGM. Simon Rich's script follows OpenAI from 2003, when a 17-year-old Ilya Sutskever (Borisov) turns up at Geoffrey Hinton's door in Toronto, to the board that fired Altman and the comeback that followed. Garfield plays Altman as a charmer who tells everyone what they want to hear. Deadline's review signs off with "Be afraid. Be very afraid."
In June, Amazon announced that the film "will be better served if it were released by a different studio". It gave no reason. It didn't really need to: a few months earlier it had signed a partnership with OpenAI that included a $50 billion investment.
Back in May, Amazon had reportedly wanted to push the release into early 2027, so it wouldn't collide with Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning. Then it dropped the film altogether. The distributors who saw it in late spring passed too, Netflix and Focus Features among them, before Neon took it on, reportedly without paying a minimum guarantee.
One executive at a rival studio has a theory about all those passes:
"A reaction this strong just shows you, every studio pretending the film wasn't releasable is just conflicted out by their own investments in AI."
— a rival studio executive, to Variety
Amazon wasn't scared of a bad film. It was scared of a good one about its business partner.
A reckoning ten years late
The Social Reckoning, Sorkin's follow-up to The Social Network with Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, opened in the US on 9 October with an estimated $5.5 million from 2,606 cinemas. By Variety's reading, the critics have already settled which of the two is the real heir to David Fincher's 2010 film, and it isn't the one Sorkin made.
On r/movies, a thread asking why one works and the other doesn't got its top answer in a single line:
"Because one of them was directed by someone who knows how to direct."
Cheeky, but the second-best reply goes deeper. Facebook was radicalising people "a decade ago and more", and the world shrugged. "I don't know who got reckoned but certainly not Facebook," the commenter wrote. "So who is this for?"
That's the difference between the two films. Sorkin went after a villain the world exposed years ago, and Sony had nothing to lose sleep over. Guadagnino went after the man running the most famous AI company on the planet, and the studio that had just put billions into that company decided someone else should have the honour.
Sorkin made a film about yesterday's tech villain. Guadagnino made one about today's, and that's exactly why it nearly didn't come out.
Neon opens Artificial in US cinemas on Christmas Day. The studios that passed will be watching the numbers with an interest that is not entirely about cinema.
The bigger worry is the pattern. The Social Network arrived in 2010, when Facebook was six years old. Sorkin's reckoning has turned up sixteen years later, long after the rest of us did the reckoning ourselves. If films about the people who own AI only get made when a studio has nothing invested in them, the honest version of this story will reach cinemas some time around 2036.
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