Here's the thing: a Sam Altman biopic directed by Luca Guadagnino was always going to be a lot. The first trailer for Artificial confirms it is, in fact, a lot.
Andrew Garfield stars as the OpenAI CEO, and the footage leans hard into dread. Harrowing music. A bunker full of weapons. Garfield-as-Altman calling AI 'Pandora's Box,' warning that 'countries will fall' and 'industries are gonna collapse,' and delivering lines about how 'the future is inevitable' while walking past what appears to be an armory. There is also screaming into the void. The genre is, apparently, tech biopic slash psychological horror.
Guadagnino — the director behind Call Me by Your Name, Challengers, and the Suspiria remake — is a reasonable choice if you want your Silicon Valley origin story to feel like a slow-burn nightmare. The film covers the events of 2023, when Altman was abruptly fired from OpenAI and then reinstated five days later. The source material is, objectively, already strange.
The cast includes Yura Borisov, Monica Barbaro, Ike Barinholtz, Jason Schwartzman, and Mark Rylance alongside Garfield.
Artificial hits theaters on Christmas Day — which the source describes as 'just three years after the story that inspired it.'
The road to release was its own drama. Amazon MGM was originally set to distribute the film but dropped the project after investing $50 billion into OpenAI, saying the film 'would be better served if it were released by a different studio.' Netflix, A24, and Focus all passed. Neon eventually signed on as distributor.
Read that distribution history again. A studio bankrolls a film about the CEO of a company, then pours $50 billion into that same company, then quietly exits the film. Nobody had to say the quiet part out loud — the changelog said it for them.
What Artificial actually argues about Altman, OpenAI, or the AI industry remains to be seen. But the trailer's framing — weapons caches, apocalyptic monologues, a CEO who sounds like he's narrating the end of something — is either Guadagnino's signature maximalism or the most honest marketing in recent tech history. Possibly both. It ships Christmas Day.
