Luca Guadagnino’s OpenAI Movie Artificial Is Heading to New York Film Festival

Artificial will officially premiere at the 64th New York Film Festival.

The screening will take place on October 5 at Lincoln Centre's Alice Tully Hall, with Guadagnino and cast members expected to attend.

The festival itself runs from September 25 through October 12.

It's a significant destination for a movie that has already generated enormous curiosity because of both its subject and the unusual circumstances surrounding its release.

Guadagnino also has plenty of history with the festival.

Previous films, including Call Me by Your Name, Bones and All, Queer, and After the Hunt, have all appeared there.

This time, however, he's arriving with something very different.

A Hollywood drama about events that happened barely three years ago.

Andrew Garfield takes the central role as Sam Altman.

But some of the casting surrounding him might be even more interesting.

Monica Barbaro plays Mira Murati, the former OpenAI chief technology officer who briefly became interim CEO during the turmoil surrounding Altman's removal.

Yura Borisov plays OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, one of the most important figures in the events the movie is exploring.

And Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk.

The wider cast includes Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman and Chris O'Dowd.

It's an impressive group of actors being asked to dramatise people and events that remain extremely current.

And that alone makes Artificial considerably different from the average Hollywood biographical drama.

The story behind Artificial sounds like something Hollywood might have invented.

Except it actually happened.

In November 2023, OpenAI's board suddenly removed Sam Altman as CEO.

The announcement stunned the technology industry and triggered several days of chaos inside the company.

Employees threatened to leave.

Microsoft became heavily involved in what happened next.

OpenAI's leadership changed repeatedly.

And only days after being removed, Altman returned as CEO.

An extraordinary corporate power struggle unfolded inside the company responsible for one of the technologies already beginning to reshape the world.

That gives Guadagnino something considerably more interesting than a straightforward story about the creation of an enormously successful company.

This is a movie about what happened when the people controlling that company suddenly turned on each other.

The story surrounding Artificial became even stranger earlier this year.

Amazon MGM Studios originally backed the project.

Then the studio decided not to release it.

That decision attracted plenty of attention because Amazon had also announced a major strategic relationship with OpenAI.

Whatever the reasons, Artificial suddenly needed another home.

Neon eventually acquired the movie.

For Andrew Garfield, the move doesn't appear to have damaged his enthusiasm for the project.

He has previously spoken positively about both Amazon's support during production and Neon becoming its new distributor.

Now the movie has a major festival launch to go with that new home.

Perhaps the biggest reason we're interested in Artificial is the person directing it.

Luca Guadagnino isn't exactly known for making safe corporate biopics.

His films have ranged from Call Me by Your Name and Suspiria to Bones and All, Challengers and Queer.

That makes him a fascinating choice for a story about boardrooms, artificial intelligence and Silicon Valley power.

New York Film Festival artistic director Dennis Lim has described Guadagnino's approach as both darkly funny and urgent, suggesting the movie won't simply recreate a sequence of meetings and corporate announcements.

Good.

Because the real events were already strange enough.

The question is what Guadagnino finds underneath them.

There's also no escaping the timing.

Artificial intelligence isn't some historical subject Hollywood has decided to revisit decades later.

The argument is happening right now.

Filmmakers are debating AI.

Actors are negotiating protections against it.

Studios are experimenting with it.

Writers and artists are questioning what it could mean for their jobs.

And audiences are trying to understand where any of this eventually leads.

Artificial is therefore arriving while the company at the centre of its story remains part of that enormous global conversation.

That could make the movie feel unusually immediate.

It could also make it incredibly contentious.

We'll admit it.

This sounds fascinating.

Not because we're desperate to watch two hours of people discussing corporate governance around a conference table.

But because the OpenAI drama was already almost absurdly cinematic.

A hugely influential CEO gets suddenly fired.

Employees revolt.

Some of the biggest names in technology become involved.

The company appears to be falling apart.

And then, within days, the man who was fired walks straight back through the door.

Put Luca Guadagnino behind the camera and Andrew Garfield in the middle of all that, and we're interested.

There's also something wonderfully strange about Hollywood already turning the 2023 OpenAI crisis into a movie while the wider argument about artificial intelligence is still unfolding around us.

By the time Artificial reaches audiences, parts of the technology it discusses may already have changed again.

That might ultimately be the movie's biggest challenge.

But right now, it also makes Artificial one of the most intriguing films heading into the final part of 2026.

New York gets to see it first.