AMAZON DROPS OPENAI FLICK
Amazon MGM Studios killed a nearly finished film about Altman's 2023 ouster months after its $50 billion OpenAI partnership was announced.
by editor3 min readcomments soon
Amazon MGM Studios is no longer releasing Luca Guadagnino's nearly finished comedic drama about Sam Altman's five-day firing from OpenAI in November 2023. The studio confirmed it will not distribute the film, which had screened well with test audiences after roughly a year of production. An Amazon spokesperson said, "The company has great respect for Guadagnino but believes the film would be a better fit at another studio."
The decision lands directly on top of a $50 billion partnership Amazon announced with OpenAI earlier this year, a deal that includes AWS becoming OpenAI's exclusive cloud partner. Altman and Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos reportedly attended Bezos's wedding together last year. The timing is not subtle.
WHAT WAS IT ABOUT
The biopic covers the chaotic days in November 2023 when OpenAI's board abruptly fired Altman. The root cause, per the film's framing: Altman tried to push out board member Helen Toner after she praised rival Anthropic's Claude safety practices over OpenAI's. Microsoft offered Altman a job almost instantly, and most of OpenAI's staff threatened to quit. Four days later, Altman was reinstated as CEO with a reshuffled board.
The cast is stacked: Andrew Garfield as Altman, Monica Barbaro as former CTO Mira Murati, Yura Borisov as co-founder Ilya Sutskever, and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk. But multiple reports suggest the film leans darker than Amazon expected. Both Altman and Musk come across as the least sympathetic figures on screen.
THE MONEY TRAIL IS THE STORY
Amazon dropped months after announcing that $50 billion OpenAI deal. The financial ties between Amazon and OpenAI are now deep enough that a movie painting Altman in an unflattering light becomes a business liability for the studio. That is the kind of pressure that does not require a memo. It is just there, in the room, when executives decide what to spend marketing dollars on.
Insiders told multiple outlets that both Altman and Musk come off poorly in the film. For Altman, the personal cost is higher: he and Bezos are reportedly friends, and the $50 billion deal makes the movie an ongoing awkwardness every time the two companies appear together at an event.
CENSORSHIP BY CONVENIENCE
One outlet described it as an indirect form of censorship, subtler than Trump's feud with US comedians, but no less effective, and maybe more dangerous for exactly that reason. The observation is worth sitting with. Nobody at Amazon is saying the movie is too critical of Altman. They are saying another studio is a better fit. The effect is the same: a nearly finished film about a powerful tech CEO, built by a celebrated director with a marketable cast, now has no distributor because the distributor's parent company is financially entangled with the subject.
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