In a shock move, Amazon MGM has dropped acclaimed director Luca Guadagnino’s film Artificial. With the movie so close to completion, the news has prompted the urgent search for a new distributor.

It was originally thought that the film would enjoy a 2026 festival run before a theatrical autumn release, with high hopes for its awards season potential. Artificial is being described as The Social Network, but updated for the age of AI. (The sequel to The Social Network, The Social Reckoning, hits cinemas this autumn, directed by the former’s screenwriter Aaron Sorkin.)

Artificial follows Sam Altman, played by Andrew Garfield, and his connections with the company OpenAI. The film also features Yura Borisov (an Oscar nominee for the acclaimed Anora) as Ilya Sutskever, one of the company’s leading board members who ousted Altman as CEO in 2023. The rest of the star-studded cast includes Monica Barbaro, Jason Schwartzman, Mark Rylance, Cooper Hoffman, and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk.

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Production woes aren’t new for Guadagnino: his DC Studios film Sgt. Rock, which was set to star Colin Farrell, was also scrapped, albeit at a much earlier stage of production.

The director’s most recent film, 2025’s After the Hunt, was also distributed by Amazon MGM. It received highly divisive reactions and ultimately missed out on any awards season action. Before that, the Italian filmmaker had courted Oscar success and critical plaudits with the likes of Call Me By Your Name, Challengers, Queer, Bones and All, and his Suspiria remake.

With the all-but-finished film now without a distributor, it is unclear when the film will be released in cinemas. 

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