Luca Guadagnino‘s Artificial, chronicling the consequential days leading up to the sudden firing and reinstatement of Sam Altman as CEO of OpenAI, will earn its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 5.
It will then receive a Gala screening at London Film Festival on Oct. 11, with talent expected to attend both events. Andrew Garfield stars as Altman, with Yura Borisov, Monica Barbaro, Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Chris O’Dowd and Mark Rylance alongside him. Ike Barinholtz features as the richest man on earth, SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk. The news comes after reports suggested the movie would be skipping the festival circuit.
It’s been a bumpy ride for Guadagnino and his film, after Amazon MGM Studios — which developed and financed the project — dropped it in June. The timing was interesting: It came only a few months after the news that Amazon will invest $50 billion in the artificial intelligence research and deployment company as part of a “multi-year strategic partnership” that will accelerate OpenAI’s consumption of Amazon Web Services.
Amazon released a statement saying the film would “be better served if it were released by a different studio,” and Artificial was later rescued by Neon (after Netflix, A24 and Focus Features reportedly passed), which plans to release the film sometime later this year in order to qualify for this year’s Oscar race.
“I can’t say much because we are right in the middle of this situation,” said Guadagnino, director of Call Me by Your Name, Challengers and After the Hunt to Italian television late June. “[But] these are industrial policies that are certainly not new… To me, the issue isn’t artificial intelligence itself. What matters most to me are the people. It is completely changing the face — not just of society in terms of consumption and how we relate to these tools, but the very face of the identity of a place like the United States and the entire world — with the rise of this small oligarchy that wields truly radical control.”
Garfield himself spoke in a profile for Esquire just last week about taking on the role of Altman. “I don’t know this person, to be clear,” the British actor began. “I don’t know Sam Altman. I’ve never met him. I was going off of the script and court transcripts and interviews and research, and we were telling a story. But I think anyone who takes on that level of responsibility for a company or a technology that you know is going to do a hell of a lot of damage to the soul of humanity [must have] a certain ability to dissociate.”
The 2026 BFI London Film Festival will run from Oct. 7-18, and on Tuesday confirmed a raft of talent participating in this year’s Screen Talks section.