An upcoming movie based on the life of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been dropped by Amazon’s MGM Studios.

Artificial, which features Spider-Man actor Andrew Garfield as Altman, covers the brief period during which the CEO was fired and rehired by the company in 2023. The removal was reportedly due to concerns that Altman was not “consistently candid in his communications with the board.” The petition to reinstate Altman later received 500 signatures from OpenAI staff.

The movie, from Academy Award-nominated Call Me by Your Name director Luca Guadagnino, was pegged for release in early 2027. However, an Amazon spokesperson told Puck that the upcoming movie “will be better served if it were released by a different studio” and that they are working with the filmmaking team “to find the film a new home.”

An anonymous source told Puck that the decision was made by Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, after he watched a cut of the movie that was “markedly darker” in tone than the original script. It reportedly portrays real-life tech industry figures such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

The news comes as Amazon became one of OpenAI’s biggest investors earlier this year. In February, Amazon announced it would invest $50 billion in the ChatGPT maker, starting with a $15 billion investment and followed by another $35 billion in the following months, pending certain conditions. The deal would see the tech giants partner on several projects, including Amazon Web Services becoming the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, one of its enterprise offerings.

In early 2025, Amazon paid $40 million for the rights to a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump. It then doled out another $35 million to market the film, The New York Times reports.

Fans of tech-related dramas still have other options to look forward to, regardless of what happens with Artificial. The Social Reckoning, the sequel to the 2010 Oscar-winning film The Social Network, is pegged for release this fall by Sony Pictures.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

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