Andrew Garfield’s Controversial Sam Altman Movie ‘Artificial’ Finally Has a Premiere Date & First Look, and It’s a Big One

Few films this year have generated quite as much industry chatter before ever reaching a screen as this particular Silicon Valley drama. The project has spent months bouncing between studios, sparking speculation about corporate pressure and raising eyebrows over just how candidly Hollywood is willing to dramatize one of the tech world’s most powerful current players.

That uncertainty reached a genuine turning point back in June, when Amazon MGM Studios, which had developed and financed the roughly $40 million production, announced the completed film would be better served by a different distributor entirely. The move drew wide scrutiny given that it followed Amazon’s own February announcement of a $50 billion investment partnership with OpenAI, fueling speculation the studio simply didn’t want to release a film reportedly unflattering toward Sam Altman.

Now, after a whirlwind acquisition by Neon, ‘Artificial’ finally has a firm premiere date. Luca Guadagnino’s drama will world premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 5, according to Variety. Andrew Garfield stars as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and will attend the premiere alongside co-stars Monica Barbaro, Yura Borisov, and Ike Barinholtz, who plays Elon Musk.

Written by ‘Miracle Workers’ creator Simon Rich, ‘Artificial’ reconstructs the extraordinary five-day corporate crisis that unfolded in November 2023, when OpenAI’s board abruptly fired Altman before reinstating him just days later. Borisov plays OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, the executive who spearheaded the effort to remove Altman, while Barbaro portrays former chief technology officer Mira Murati.

The film’s ensemble cast extends well beyond its central four, rounding out with Chris O’Dowd, Jason Schwartzman, Cooper Hoffman, Billie Lourd, Zosia Mamet, and Mark Rylance. Producers on the project include David Heyman, Jeffrey Clifford, Jennifer Fox, Guadagnino, and Rich.

NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim addressed the film’s timeliness in a statement, saying, “The most remarkable thing about Luca Guadagnino’s sly and sobering new film is that it finds the perfect tone to tell the story of how we arrived at the AI precipice. Artificial traces this trajectory with clear-eyed horror, dark humor, and a sense of existential urgency. If ever there was a movie for its moment, this is it.”

This isn’t Garfield’s first time playing a real-life tech executive on screen. He previously portrayed Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin in 2010’s ‘The Social Network,’ making ‘Artificial’ something of a thematic return to Silicon Valley drama for the actor over a decade later.

Beyond its New York debut, ‘Artificial’ will also receive a gala screening at the BFI London Film Festival on October 11, with talent again expected to be in attendance. The 64th New York Film Festival runs from September 25 through October 12, giving ‘Artificial’ a prominent Main Slate slot within one of the industry’s most closely watched fall festival circuits.

With Amazon’s original reluctance to release the film only adding to the intrigue surrounding its subject matter, ‘Artificial’s’ NYFF premiere gives audiences their first real chance to judge for themselves whether the finished product lives up to the controversy that preceded it.

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