Artificial: Luca Guadagnino's OpenAI Boardroom Comedy, Explained
Andrew Garfield plays Sam Altman in a Luca Guadagnino movie about the week OpenAI fired its own CEO and begged him back five days later. Nobody could have pitched this as fiction — it happened in real time, on Twitter.
I watched this trailer three times before I believed what I was watching: Andrew Garfield playing Sam Altman, in a Luca Guadagnino film, about the week OpenAI fired its own CEO and then begged him to come back five days later. Nobody could have pitched this as fiction. It happened in November 2023, in real time, on Twitter, and I remember not being able to look away from it then either.
Garfield leads an ensemble that's stacked on purpose — Yura Borisov, Monica Barbaro, Mark Rylance, Jason Schwartzman among them — and Simon Rich wrote the screenplay, which tells me this isn't playing the story straight. Good. The real version wasn't straight either: a nonprofit board fired the most talked-about CEO in tech, watched 700 employees threaten to walk out behind him, watched Microsoft offer to just absorb the entire leadership team, and reversed course before the week was even over.
Here's the part I can't get over. OpenAI's own investigation later found Altman's conduct "did not mandate removal" — it wasn't safety, it wasn't fraud, it wasn't the money. It was trust, handled badly, by a board that had the authority to act and no real plan for what came after. That's not a tech thriller premise. That's a boardroom running out of adults in the room, on camera, in front of the entire industry.
Artificial — Official Teaser Trailer
Neon's got it in theaters December 25th, wide in January. I'll be there opening weekend — this is the first AI-era movie I actually want to see twice.