Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial: first teaser shows Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, Neon sets US release for Dec 25

The first teaser for Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, featuring Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, has been released.

The trailer shows Garfield descending the staircase of a luxurious mansion and entering a basement filled with dozens of machine guns while ominous electronic music plays and the character states, “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.”

The film depicts Altman’s abrupt firing and reinstatement as OpenAI’s CEO amid a fight over control of the technology. The cast includes Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, Monica Barbaro and Cooper Hoffman as Altman colleagues, plus Jason Schwartzman, Chris O’Dowd, Zosia Mamet, Cooper Koch and Billie Lourd.

Amazon said earlier this summer it believed “Artificial will be better served if it were released by a different studio” and worked with the filmmaking team to find a new home. On 30 June 2024 (EDT, UTC−4) Neon announced it had acquired Artificial and added it to its awards-season slate.

Neon will release the film in the US on Dec. 25, 2024 (EST, UTC−5) after it premieres at the New York Film Festival in October. Garfield told Esquire he does not know Sam Altman and commented on the responsibilities tied to portraying such a figure. Cooper Hoffman told Variety he was not surprised Amazon dropped the film and welcomed Neon’s acquisition.

Neon has recently become a prominent awards-season distributor, working on films such as Parasite, Anatomy of a Fall and Anora.