Welcome to entertainment where one unrelated division’s interests and deals impact movies and television. Amazon will no longer release Luca Guadagnino‘s film Artificial, which is a biopic about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The film stars Andrew Garfield as Altman and is currently in post-production.

A spokesperson for Amazon confirmed the change of plans:

We have the utmost respect and admiration for Luca Guadagnino as an award-winning filmmaker — not to mention a longstanding relationship that we hope to continue. We believe that Artificial will be better served if it were released by a different studio and are working closely with the filmmaking team to find the film a new home.

Amazon has said it’d “attempt to help” Guadagnino find another studio to release the project.

In February 2026, OpenAI and Amazon announced a strategic partnership that included an environment of OpenAI models available to AWS customers, AWS being the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, Amazon investing $50 billion OpenAI, and more.

Artificial explores Sam Altman’s OpenAI and its turbulent time in 2023 when Altman was fired and rehired over a couple of days.

The film was announced in 2025 and the ensemble includes Mark Rylance, Andrew Garfield, Yura Borisov, Monica Barbaro, Billie Lourd, Jason Schwartzman, Cooper Koch, Cooper Hoffman, and Ike Barinholtz.

Beyond the partnership witb OpenAI, Amazon’s chief Jeff Bezos has been bullish on artificial intelligence, stating more resources should be given to it and that it wouldn’t take jobs from humans but he believes it’ll create jobs.

Experts have warner AI will have a negative impact on the labor market and we’ve already seen its devastating impact on the environment and its sucking up utilities causing prices to soar.

The move by Amazon should be a concern for anyone when it comes to the consolidation of entertainment and news by large tech companies and their willingness to use both to benefit themselves.

Amazon’s move can easily be read as its unwillingness to criticize a partner of theirs, risking an investment. It should then extend to Bezos’ Washington Post and what stories they might be ignoring or suppressing due to similar concerns.

With the current acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount Skydance, we can question that marriage of technology company (Paramount Skydance’s owner David Ellison is the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison) and entertainment and whether the new Paramount Skydance/WBD would be willing to have its news division or entertainment criticize AI or even come out against it. DC Comics‘ leadership has stated AI would not be used in the production of their product as an example and we’ve seen Ellison’s choice for leadership of CBS News willing to spike stories to benefit the Ellison’s and their relationship with the Trump administration.

A bigger question needs to go to those in the entertainment industry, how much are they willing to go along with this “mandate” and how much are they willing to push back against it?