Trailer Released for OpenAI Movie Artificial
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What happened
Neon released a teaser trailer for Artificial, a Luca Guadagnino film written by Simon Rich and starring Andrew Garfield as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The movie, scheduled for a December 25 theatrical release after a New York Film Festival premiere and a BFI London screening, is a story of ChatGPT's creation set against the five days in November 2023 when OpenAI's board ousted Altman as CEO and then reinstated him. In the trailer, Garfield's Altman says, "We opened Pandora's Box together. 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," and is shown walking into a room stacked with automatic guns behind glass. Amazon dropped the project in June after a partnership integrating OpenAI's models into Amazon Web Services. The cast also includes Yura Borisov, Monica Barbaro, Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Zosia Mamet, Billie Lourd, Chris O'Dowd, Ike Barinholtz, and Mark Rylance.
Omitted — what each side leaves out
Unpacked
Left-leaning coverage presents Artificial as a thriller about Sam Altman's firing and reinstatement, while right-leaning coverage never mentions that crisis and calls the film a story of ChatGPT's creation. Mother Jones locates the movie in the five days after the OpenAI board ousted its CEO. Breitbart instead introduces Garfield's Altman through "a story of the creation of ChatGPT," with the board fight absent.
Left-leaning coverage uses the teaser mainly to run through OpenAI's Pentagon work and a rushed math announcement from the same week. Right-leaning coverage uses the same clip to name the director, the writer, the supporting cast, and a New York Film Festival premiere.
Does the finished film dramatize the board ouster, the invention of ChatGPT, or both?
Bottom line
A Breitbart reader never hears that Artificial is built around Altman's 2023 firing, and a Mother Jones reader never hears who directed it or that it premieres at the New York Film Festival.
The receipts — 6 facts one side's coverage lacks
- The film is set against the five days in November 2023 after Altman was ousted and then reinstated as CEO
- Amazon dropped the project in June following its partnership with OpenAI
- Neon released the teaser
- Luca Guadagnino directed the film
- Artificial will premiere at the New York Film Festival and play BFI London
- Court documents released text messages of Altman pleading with interim CEO Mira Murati to be reinstated
The Left View
Mother Jones frames Artificial as OpenAI's "The Social Network" movie moment and asks whether the film will have any sympathy for Altman or portray him as "a monstrous villain undeserving of such consideration," citing court-released text messages in which he pleaded to be reinstated and reporting that former co-workers describe "an implacable drive for more power." The outlet says the trailer "doesn't do much to dispel" distrust of him, and that the question for audiences—"can and should Altman be trusted with a tool as powerful as artificial intelligence?"—is "not subtle." It argues thriller marketing "makes sense because OpenAI has undeniably done things worthy of the genre," pointing to a $200-million Pentagon agreement from February, an Intercept report that the Pentagon asked OpenAI to design automated tools that would "rarely deny their requests," and OpenAI's announcement that it had solved a 200-year-old math problem, which mathematician Tristan Buckmaster said the company rushed after learning of progress by him and Anthropic employee Levent Alpöge—conduct Mother Jones says "wasn't about the good of humanity. It was about competition." The piece also treats Amazon's June withdrawal as following the AWS partnership, and compares Garfield's prior role as Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network, which "seemed to sympathize with Zuckerberg as a tragic figure" before later platform harms, to Aaron Sorkin's forthcoming The Social Reckoning.
The Right View
Breitbart headlines the trailer as teasing a "Terrifying OpenAI Future," foregrounding the prediction that countries will fall and industries collapse. It quotes the "Pandora's Box" voiceover and describes Altman arriving at the office along a path that includes the gun room, presenting those beats as the film's warning about artificial intelligence rather than as a brief against Altman personally. The rest of the item is a production notice: Guadagnino previously directed Garfield in After the Hunt, Rich wrote the screenplay, the ensemble is named, and the film will premiere at the New York Film Festival and play BFI London.
Our Take (balanced)
Mother Jones's strongest argument is that the trailer's trust question is justified by the 2023 ouster record—pleading messages and colleagues' accounts of an "implacable drive for more power"—and by OpenAI's later Pentagon work and, in Buckmaster's telling, a competitive rush on a math problem that was not "about the good of humanity." Breitbart's strongest argument is the trailer's own language: it sells an already-opened "Pandora's Box" and an "inevitable" future in which countries fall, so the movie is being marketed as a thriller about AI's civilizational scale, not only about one CEO. The central unresolved tension is whether Artificial asks viewers to decide if Altman and OpenAI should be the ones who "shepherd people into this new world," or to accept that world as already locked in.
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