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Amazon MGM Studios’ sudden dumping of Artificial, the Luca Guadagnino-directed movie about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, may have been unexpected, but it wasn’t terribly surprising.
After all, Amazon was among the major investors in a funding round announced this February, which injected the AI company with $110 billion. It doesn’t make a ton of business sense to then turn around and continue to fund a $40-million movie starring Andrew Garfield that portrays Altman as a “pathological liar,” according to Variety.
But the fact that abandoning the nearly completed Artificial is a sound move for Amazon is the problem.
Thanks to the two-pronged attack on creativity in Hollywood from consolidation and tech’s encroaching influence on the industry, it is becoming more and more rare to see a major studio showing anything resembling a backbone with its output. With fingers in essentially every pie of modern life, a company like Amazon has an increasingly narrow needle to threat in trying to make art that won’t upset any of the other revenue streams.
The same is especially true if a corporation has dealings with the federal government (like getting merges approved, for instance) and if that government has some authoritarian tendencies — or at the very least is led by a sensitive egomaniac.
A handful of recent, well-regarded films struggled to even reach audiences because of the governmental risk that could come from distributing the projects.
The Apprentice, starring eventual Oscar nominee Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump, screened in competition at Cannes, but struggled to find distribution until Briarcliff Entertainment and a concerted social media campaign got it onto screens. Similarly, Ask E. Jean, an acclaimed documentary about the woman who successfully sued the president for sexually assaulting and defaming her, went months without a sale until Abramorama picked it up in March.
No Other Land, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars last year did so without ever landing a U.S. distributor.
And while there’s still no new buyer for Artificial, there are a few promising leads. After Netflix, A24, Focus, and WB’s new boutique label Clockwork passed, Mubi and Neon have emerged as potential distributors, according to Variety. But the film’s uncertain fate underscore the unsettling fact that the fewer and fewer companies that control the pipelines to theaters and streaming platforms will always choose share price over art.
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