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NEON is the distributor releasing Artificial, Luca Guadagnino's film about the five days in November 2023 when OpenAI's board fired Sam Altman and then took him back. Andrew Garfield plays Altman and Yura Borisov plays Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist who helped remove him, with Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati, Cooper Hoffman as Greg Brockman, Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk and Mark Rylance as Geoffrey Hinton. Simon Rich wrote it and Damon Albarn scored it. It premieres at the New York Film Festival on 5 October and opens in American cinemas on 25 December. In the teaser Garfield's Altman walks an armed compound saying "We've opened Pandora's Box together", then "Countries will fall" and "Industries are gonna collapse". How it got to a cinema is the second story. Amazon MGM, whose parent has a $50 billion deal with OpenAI, dropped the film in June 2026, telling Deadline it had "the utmost respect and admiration for Luca Guadagnino" and that the picture "will be better served if it were released by a different studio". Netflix, A24 and Focus Features passed after that, and the reporting on why is split between the powerful people the film portrays and the film simply underwhelming buyers. Neon took worldwide rights and is opening it on Christmas Day. Both halves sit on the same question, which is where control actually is as against where the paperwork says it is. OpenAI's board had the charter, the mandate and the votes, and it lost inside a weekend, because the staff and Microsoft were on the other side. A film about that then found its own release running through the accounts of companies with money in the subject. If you are raising, that is the version of the governance question worth asking: not what your documents give you, but who follows you out of the door.

NEON 8 Sep 2026