A24 and Netflix have passed on Artificial, the Luca Guadagnino film about OpenAI dumped by Amazon. MUBI may be interested, though.

Despite spending $40m on its production, Amazon MGM has declined to release Artificial, the latest film from director Luca Guadagnino. This has left the Challengers filmmaker and his financial partners hunting around for a new studio willing to distribute a potentially up-to-the-moment tech drama.

According to Variety, the process of shopping Artificial around has already started – and several companies have already turned the film down. Netflix and A24 are two of the big names. Focus Features, and Warner Bros’ indie wing, Clockwork – founded last December and and set to distribute Park Chan-wook’s The Brigands Of Rattlecreek – have also passed.

It isn’t all bad news for Guadagnino, though. Trendy indie distributor MUBI is said to be interested, as is Neon, the company behind such films as Longlegs and Anora.

Artificial is a Social Network-esque drama about Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI and the public face of tech’s hottest piece of plagiarism software, ChatGPT. Andrew Garfield plays Altman, and the film’s portrait of its subject isn’t thought to be a flattering one; by all accounts, Altman is portrayed as the sort of person who’ll say anything to get what he wants. Then again, Elon Musk, played in the movie by Ike Barinholtz, isn’t said to come out of the film well, either (he’s ‘highly antipathetic’ according to Variety).

Read more: Amazon MGM’s dumping of Artificial highlights the problem with a shrinking Hollywood

There have been some reports that Artificial hasn’t tested all that well in early screenings, and that this could be an indication of why Amazon passed on it. But Amazon also has close links to OpenAI, having invested some $50bn in the firm within the past few months. Such a deal might explain why it now thinks that Guadagnino’s film might be “better served” elsewhere.

As Variety points out, even a cool company like A24 isn’t isolated from big tech. It has its own AI division, for one thing, and is financed by Thrive Capital, an investment firm founded by businessman Joshua Kushner. He’s the younger brother of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law.

At any rate, it looks as though Artificial has found a home at MUBI, which already has a prior relationship with Guadagnino (it released Queer and Suspiria in some territories). With the film at the editing stage, it’s thought that it could make a debut at the Venice Film Festival, which takes place in early September.

We’ll be fascinated to see what Guadagnino and his collaborators have cooked up here. We’ll keep you posted as we learn more.