September 10, 2026 | 11:28 pm
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - It was just a few months ago that chatters about OpenAI frontman Sam Altman's biopic, 'Artificial,' swelled after Amazon MGM Studios made the decision to drop it. Now, the first footage of the film has been released, featuring Andrew Garfield as the contentious tech mogul himself.The teaser trailer, released on September 8, 2026, had Garfield, as Altman, walking down the stairs of a luxurious mansion before entering a basement containing dozens of machine guns."The future’s inevitable. Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse. And we get to be the ones to shepherd people into this new world," Altman narrated in the trailer, as quoted from The Guardian.The film is directed by Luca Guadagnino—best known for his 2017 queer coming-of-age 'Call Me By Your Name' and the 2024 steamy tennis romance 'Challengers'—and written by Simon Rich.'Artificial' follows the frantic firing and re-hiring of the executive behind ChatGPT, Sam Altman, during a few chaotic days in 2023. Quoting Vogue Adria, the film seems to be disinterested in exploring how the AI model came to be, but rather in what happens when such enormous power falls in the hands of a few.The film will hit the theaters on December 25, after a world premiere at the 2026 New York Film Festival on October 5, but it's a near miss.In June, Amazon MGM Studios, which developed and financed the $40 million film, suddenly announced that they would no longer distribute 'Artificial,' despite the production having been completed.This came months after Amazon announced that it was investing $50 billion in OpenAI, and a year after Sam Altman attended Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' lavish Venice wedding, The Independent reported. The studio said the film would be "better served if it were released by a different studio," and that arrived in the form of indie distributor Neon, which announced that it had acquired 'Artificial' in July after a bidding process.The trailer for the film was released the same week that Garfield admitted that he's "nervous" and "scared" about the backlash he would receive for playing Altman. "You’re playing one of arguably the most powerful people on this planet right now, or an interpretation of this person," he said during an interview with the SmartLess podcast.Meanwhile, in an earlier interview with Esquire, the Spider-Man actor clarified that "I don’t know Sam Altman. I’ve never met him.""But I think anyone who takes on that level of responsibility for a company or a technology that is going to do a hell of a lot of damage to the soul of humanity [must have] a certain ability to dissociate," he added.Joining Andrew Garfield for 'Artificial' is an intriguing ensemble case, which includes Yura Borisov as OpenAI co-founder and then chief scientist Ilya Sutskever; Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati; and Ike Barinholtz taking on the role of Elon Musk. The cast also includes Mark Rylance, Jason Schwartzman, Zosia Mamet, Cooper Hoffman, Chris O’Dowd, Cooper Koch and Billie Lourd.Read: OpenAI's Sam Altman Says AI Has Reached the SingularityClick here to get the latest news updates from Tempo on Google News
