Tickets went on sale at noon for Artificial, the OpenAI movie that doesn't start with Sam Altman
Everyone has filed it as the Sam Altman movie: Andrew Garfield, the hoodie, the five November days that nearly ended OpenAI. Then the festival premiering it published a synopsis, and the film turns out to begin twenty years earlier, in a Toronto lab, with a different man entirely.
Single tickets for the 64th New York Film Festival went on sale at noon ET on Tuesday, and one line mattered more than the rest: October 5, Alice Tully Hall, the world premiere of Artificial, Luca Guadagnino's OpenAI film, with the director and cast in the room.
The festival runs September 25 through October 12, and the film joined the Main Slate weeks after everything else — Variety had the booking on September 1. That announcement did what the trailer, out a week later, did not: it named whose story this is.
It opens in 2003 at the University of Toronto, where a Soviet-born graduate student named Ilya Sutskever starts studying artificial neural networks under Geoffrey Hinton. Altman turns up later, at Google. Yura Borisov, the Oscar-nominated half of Anora, plays Sutskever; Mark Rylance plays Hinton.
The boardroom coup is the ending, not the premise
Everything the marketing leans on — Andrew Garfield in a hoodie, the five days in November 2023 when OpenAI's board fired its chief executive and then took him back — sits at the end of a twenty-year runway. The festival's own synopsis promises a film about human and machine intelligence meeting, not a corporate thriller. Simon Rich wrote it, Damon Albarn scored it, and the $40 million shoot ran from July 2025 across San Francisco and Turin.
Dennis Lim, the festival's artistic director, did not sell it as a business story either:
"The most remarkable thing about Luca Guadagnino's sly and sobering new film is that it finds the perfect tone to tell the story of how we arrived at the AI precipice."
The casting is where it stops being abstract:
- Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, out and back inside a week.
- Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, the co-founder who was on the board that removed Altman, then signed the letter asking him back.
- Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati, made interim chief executive that weekend.
- Mark Rylance as Geoffrey Hinton, the supervisor from the 2003 scenes.
- Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, Cooper Hoffman as chairman Greg Brockman.
Amazon had it finished and let it go
Amazon MGM developed Artificial and dropped it in June 2026 with the film essentially done, shortly after announcing a $50 billion partnership with OpenAI. Neon took worldwide rights, reportedly paying Amazon nothing upfront, and inherited a production that had gone over budget and through heavy reshoots. Among buyers who passed, the reason that circulated was smaller than the politics everyone assumed:
"A question of taste" — some of them, by their own account, simply did not like the movie.
Neon opens it limited on Christmas Day and wide in January, which puts it in next year's Oscar race, not this one. Before that it plays twice in public: Alice Tully Hall on October 5, then the BFI London Film Festival on October 11.
Previously we wrote: Hayden Panettiere's screen work runs 32 years, from a 1994 soap to Sleepwalker — and two of her biggest roles were only her voice
