Andrew Garfield’s Sam Altman movie is no longer the nearly finished film that lost its distributor. Artificial now has a trailer, a new studio behind its release, and a Christmas Day opening.
Directed by Luca Guadagnino, the film follows the five days in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Altman, employees threatened to leave, and Altman returned as CEO. The trailer treats that corporate crisis like a pressure-cooker drama rather than a tidy success story.
NEON will open Artificial in select U.S. theaters on December 25, 2026, before expanding it nationwide in January 2027.
What does the Artificial trailer show?
The teaser puts Garfield’s Altman across the table from Yura Borisov’s Ilya Sutskever, the OpenAI co-founder who became a central figure in the 2023 board fight. Their conversations start politely and quickly turn uncomfortable. Phones keep ringing, loyalties shift, and everyone seems to know that one decision could change the company overnight.
Garfield does not copy Altman as a broad impression. The familiar gray sweater, clipped delivery, and controlled smile are there, but the performance looks built around how difficult he is to read. Borisov plays Sutskever with far more visible strain, giving the trailer a clear conflict before it explains every boardroom detail.
Who else is in the cast?
Monica Barbaro plays former OpenAI technology chief Mira Murati, while Cooper Hoffman appears as co-founder Greg Brockman. Ike Barinholtz takes on Elon Musk, and Mark Rylance plays computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton. Jason Schwartzman, Chris O’Dowd, Zosia Mamet, Cooper Koch, and Billie Lourd round out the ensemble.
That lineup keeps Artificial from becoming a one-man biopic. The real event involved a board, senior employees, investors, and outside pressure arriving almost at once. Simon Rich’s screenplay has enough players to show how quickly one firing turned into a Silicon Valley emergency.
Garfield also leads The Uprising, but Artificial gives him a very different kind of power struggle: no armies, just a conference room and control of one of the world’s most watched technology companies.
Why did Amazon drop Artificial?
Amazon MGM developed the film and was expected to release it, then stepped away in June while post-production was nearly complete. The company said Artificial would be better served by another studio. It did not give a detailed creative or business explanation.
The timing drew attention because Amazon had recently announced a major partnership with OpenAI. That overlap is fair to discuss, but it is not proof that the OpenAI deal caused Amazon to drop the movie. Neither company has publicly confirmed such a connection.
NEON acquired the worldwide rights later that month. The new trailer is the first chance to judge what the film actually looks like instead of treating its distributor change as the entire story.
When can you watch Artificial?
Artificial will first screen at the New York Film Festival in October. Its theatrical run begins in select theaters on Christmas Day, followed by a wider release in January. NEON has not announced a streaming date.
The trailer sells a recognizable modern scandal with a strong cast and very little distance from the real events. The harder test will come with the full movie: can it make a complicated fight over control understandable without turning every person in the room into a simple hero or villain?
