Today in Burn It All Down News, Amazon MGM Studios has dropped Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming film about Sam Altman and OpenAI. The news first broke Friday via Puck, and The Hollywood Reporter confirms that not only has Amazon MGM dropped the film—the third from Guadagnino that they were set to release, following Challengers and After the Hunt—but that Netflix and Focus Features have also now passed on the film. I hate it here.

Guadagnino’s film is titled Artificial and is billed as a comedy-drama and a biopic. Andrew Garfield stars as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman; Monica Barbaro stars as CTO Mira Murati; Anora breakout Yura Borisov stars as Ilya Sutskever, a computer scientist who was part of the failed effort to oust Altman from Open AI; and Ike Barinholtz stars as Elon Musk, which you KNOW is going to be a devastatingly precise, scathingly mean performance. (Ike Barinholtz is severely underrated for the precision of his impressions and depth of his acting ability.) The film focuses on the tumultuous period in 2023 when Sam Altman was fired by the OpenAI board only to force his own rehiring days later.

This situation reminds me of Ali Abassi’s Donald Trump biopic, The Apprentice, which no one would touch with a ten-foot pole until an unlikely hero emerged in the form of Briarcliff Entertainment, which eventually released the film (it earned two Oscar nominations). Maybe Briarcliff will ride to the rescue once again? Earlier this year, they released Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, which is an AI critical film, too. But as of this writing, Artificial is still undistributed.

The problem is, of course, all of these companies are invested in AI and no one is going to risk looking like an idiot by releasing an AI-critical film while dumping tens of billions into various AI companies at the same time (NBC is invested here and here, Netflix here). In the case of Amazon MGM, it’s hard not to see Jeff Bezos’s fingerprints on the decision to dump the film. Studio boss Mike Hopkins delivered the news to Guadagnino and the film’s producers, but Amazon is the company invested directly with OpenAI (to the tune of $50 billion) and they announced a “strategic partnership” with OpenAI earlier this year. Sam Altman was also a guest at the Bezos Bozos wedding last summer.

I doubt it will ever be put so bluntly on the record, though. No one will want the direct confirmation of billionaire executive meddling in films like this. The official Amazon statement, attributed to no one in particular, is: “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.”

Baby, I hope Luca Guadagnino loses your number and never picks up your call again. I hope other filmmakers back out of whatever deals they can or just stop taking meetings with you altogether. This should not be rewarded. This should be a warning shot to everyone in Hollywood that your work with Amazon MGM is entirely dependent on Jeff Bezos’s investments.

I’ve said it before in other contexts, but it works here, too. Filmmakers with any amount of pull, the ones who can set meetings across town and entertain rival offers to place their next projects, need to strike Amazon MGM off their list. The only message these people will ever hear is the message of money. Take your work and your box office elsewhere. One of the biggest power moves in the last half-decade is Christopher Nolan walking his projects across the street to Universal when he did not like a business decision made by a CEO. Warner Brothers has been groveling to get him back ever since, but he remains firm, working with Universal on Oppenheimer and The Odyssey, delivering them a billion dollars—it will be after The Odyssey’s opening weekend—while Warners can only watch and count lost revenue.

It’s the only message that matters. If you have the juice, take it elsewhere. Unless, of course, you’re in bed with Big AI, too, which we know a lot of actors and filmmakers are. But if you care about billionaires staying out of your business, skip the meeting at Amazon MGM. You’re not safe from interference if Jeff Bezos maybe probably thinks you’re being mean to his friends. WHY are these people so sensitive?! You have unfathomable wealth, many billions of dollars hundreds of times over, why do you care what we think of you?

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Photo credits: Phil Lewis/WENN

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