Now here’s a peek at a $40 million hot potato…

Sam Altman and Andy Jassy are both at the Sun Valley mogul retreat this week, and I’m sure the C.E.O.s of OpenAI and Amazon, respectively, have a few consequential issues on their minds. But if Altman had read the screenplay that I just did, he’d definitely want to have a word or two with his counterpart by the Duck Pond.

Artificial, or Amazon’s “OpenAI movie” as it’s been dubbed in trade announcements about director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, Challengers) and star Andrew Garfield, is a bit more than just a dramatization of the five days in 2023 when Altman was fired and then rehired as leader of the high-flying company behind ChatGPT. The film, which begins rehearsals next week in Italy, with a planned 2026 release, is actually the story of Ilya Sutskever, the idealistic and naive Israeli machine learning engineer (played by Anora breakout Yura Borisov) who co-founded the nonprofit. After several key breakthroughs, as depicted in the script, Sutskever is leveraged, marginalized, and ultimately betrayed by both his power-hungry friend Altman and the larger Silicon Valley community—with potentially disastrous consequences for all of humanity.

Written by Simon Rich, an alum of SNL and Pixar (and son of Succession producer Frank), the script is pretty much in line with what you might expect Hollywood to do with the OpenAI origin story: a straightforward indictment of the reckless culture behind the commercialization of artificial intelligence, as well as a drive-by hit on Altman, who is depicted as a liar and a master schemer—or, in the dialogue of Geoff Hinton, the British computer scientist and Sutskever mentor: “One of the most manipulative people on the planet.” Not great for Altman, to the extent he cares.

Out of respect for that filmmaking process, I won’t give away too much of the script, which has not been made public despite circulating around town. (I read a recent draft of Artificial, but these scripts change, and who knows what will end up in the final cut, especially with a filmmaker like Guadagnino, who will no doubt put his auteur stamp on the material.) I also won’t opine on the factual underpinnings for everything depicted. Rich prefaces the script with a note: “I’ve taken some dramatic liberties. But I believe this account is the most accurate portrayal of what has happened to our world and why.” Others may strongly disagree. Just like with The Social Network, the Facebook origin story released more than 15 years ago, how Hollywood mythologizes our new A.I. overlords is important. Especially since many of the actual OpenAI players are depicted in the draft I read at various stages of the company’s evolution from nonprofit “safe A.I.” consortium to the current, many-tentacled, hybrid nonprofit-with-a-for-profit-subsidiary behemoth that is disrupting Google’s dominance in search, redefining video with Sora, and worth a staggering $300 billion after a recent $40 billion fundraise.

Others depicted include Dario Amodei, the former V.P. of research at OpenAI who quit to become C.E.O. of rival Anthropic; Mira Murati, the company’s former chief technology officer (to be played by Monica Barbaro); current OpenAI president Greg Brockman; former board members Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner; as well as Satya Nadella, the C.E.O. of Microsoft and a key OpenAI backer; former Twitch C.E.O. Emmett Shear; and even journalist Kara Swisher (on the phone, of course).

Then there’s Elon Musk, the early OpenAI investor turned bitter rival, who appears in a few scenes of villainy and comic relief—more concerned with his (malfunctioning) driverless Tesla than the prospect of uncontrolled A.I. destroying the world. He’s a minor character, especially after he tries to merge OpenAI into Tesla and then pulls his investment when he’s rebuffed. But Elon, as famous for loving movies as he is for suing people, is probably not gonna like this portrayal—nor, likely, will his Grok chatbot. (Unfortunately for Grok, there are no pro-Hitler references in the script.) At one point, Murati says of Musk: “Elon’s not so bad, as far as dictators go.”

Given all that, I’m honestly a little surprised that Amazon would make this movie. CAA shopped Artificial last year and got passes from traditional studios like Warner Bros. and Paramount. According to sources, the reluctance was due mostly to the script—“dull,” according to one buyer. But another source acknowledged a fear of making a movie that explicitly took on Elon, Altman, and the emerging A.I. power structure. Interestingly, the project landed at Amazon MGM Studios, which is ramping up its movie output under film chief Courtenay Valenti.

Once Guadagnino and Garfield came on board a couple months ago, and with new Bond producer David Heyman leading the producing team, Valenti pushed the greenlight button at a budget of about $40 million. An Amazon rep declined to comment when I asked whether Valenti or her boss, Prime Video head Mike Hopkins, let Jassy or the Seattle folks know they’re making a movie targeting Altman, Musk, and Amazon’s big rivals in A.I. But I can’t imagine they’d blindside the C-suite like that.

Amazon is highly invested in the technology, and specifically in Anthropic, led by Amodei. In the script, Amodei quits OpenAI in disgust after Altman brings in the big, bad Microsoft as an investor. “I am starting a new company, which will be exactly like this one, only not full of motherfucking horse shit!” Amodei declares to his colleagues in a Jerry Maguire–esque kiss-off speech. Ironic, of course, because the FT reported yesterday that Amazon is considering upping its already robust $8 billion investment in Anthropic.

Other than Sutskever, who is basically the engineer version of The Social Network’s Eduardo Saverin (also played by Garfield, strangely), nobody looks particularly good in the Artificial script. The question is whether any of these people will care when the movie comes out. Normally I’d think not, but that Oscar-winning Aaron Sorkin script for Social Network essentially defined Mark Zuckerberg in the public consciousness for more than a decade as a petulant, misogynistic coder brat who unleashed Facebook on the world to attain what he couldn’t in college: social status and a girlfriend. (Never mind that Zuckerberg has said he was already dating his now-wife, Priscilla, at the time.)

I’d argue that Social Network, while just a movie, did damage Zuckerberg and Facebook in the court of public and political opinion. It grossed $224 million in theaters in 2010, and the movie’s impact has only been boosted by the exponential growth of the company since that time. So much so that Sorkin is revisiting the subject for a sequel that may or may not blame Meta for the events of January 6, depending on whether you believe Sony’s recent press release or Sorkin’s own words to me and Peter Hamby last year.

My point is that this Artificial movie may come and go with little interest or impact… or maybe it will be good, and popular, and win awards, and influence how the public perceives Altman and the origin of a technology more and more of us are using every day, so maybe he and the OpenAI folks should care about the Hollywood version of their story. Remember, while Zuckerberg and the Facebook team were publicly downplaying Social Network, behind the scenes, there were months of back-and-forth between Sony lawyers and producer Scott Rudin, on one side, and Sheryl Sandberg and other Facebook executives on the other. Rudin acknowledged at the time that they let the Facebook people read the script, see an early version, and suggest some changes—to a point. Amazon declined to tell me whether it has or would attempt to involve Altman or others in the filmmaking process.

All of which highlights an uncomfortable truth for Hollywood in 2025: Amazon is one of only a small handful of companies that would or even could make Artificial, which is essentially a $40 million hot potato. Back when Sony greenlit Social Network in 2009, the thought of a digital upstart being more powerful, legally or politically, than a Hollywood movie studio connected to a global consumer electronics behemoth seemed silly. I remember talking with Sony’s general counsel at the time, and the feeling toward Facebook was, essentially, You want to come at us? Go ahead. That’s how most studios used to act when their product was challenged—and, to be fair, some still do.

But these days, many movie studios are either in a weakened condition or owned by tech platforms with lots of other business interests, so they do have to think about whether the benefit of poking far more powerful players is worth the backlash and potential litigation. The studios haven’t made a major movie with a North Korean or Chinese villain since theThe Interview fiasco at Sony a decade ago. Media companies continue to pay off Donald Trump (including Amazon, with its $40 million Melania graft—sorry, documentary). Disney and others returned to advertising on Twitter/X, despite the hate speech, after Elon threatened to sue them. (That was even after Musk told Disney C.E.O. Bob Iger to “go fuck yourself” at a conference.) None of the usual studios or streamers bid last year on the Trump movie The Apprentice, even though it was pretty obvious after Cannes that it would generate at least one Oscar nomination. (It earned two for indie Briarcliff, more than all the movies from Sony’s main studio combined.) Risk-averse Apple probably wouldn’t touch a radioactive subject like A.I., and a rep says Artificial wasn’t even pitched. Netflix didn’t see the script, either, though they’d probably do it if they liked the creative.

So I suppose it’s surprising and applause-worthy that Amazon would make this Artificial movie. Even with the company’s vast resources and relative strength in the tech hierarchy, it’s still a risk to paint some of the most powerful people in the world as reckless with a technology that—if you believe their own words—is perhaps the most dangerous the world has ever seen. Especially when Amazon is playing that same dangerous game.

See you Monday,
Matt

Got a question, comment, complaint, or a job for Linda Yaccarino? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

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