Critics Vindicate ‘Artificial’ After Messy Amazon MGM Breakup (and the Studios vs. Talent Wars Around AI Are Just Beginning)

Luca Guadagnino’s genre-blending movie about the evils of artificial intelligence (and one of its fathers, Sam Altman) had a triumphant U.K. premiere at the London Film Festival on Sunday. The director, standing beside key cast members Andrew Garfield and Yura Borisov, received thunderous applause at Royal Festival Hall.

The British event followed the world premiere of “Artificial” a week earlier at the New York Film Festival. It was a make-or-break moment for a project plagued by scandal after Amazon MGM punted the film off its summer slate. Worse was what came after: an odious whisper campaign saying the film stank (anonymous sources dismissed it as only worthy of a streaming release, according to a July report). But the Big Apple swallowed the film with rapture.

“So this is a dawn-of-a-new-world story, as well as a backstabbing corporate business story, and also a horror movie, in which AI emerges from the lab as a sinister serpent,” wrote Variety chief critic Owen Gleiberman in his review, calling the movie a “brilliant but playful docudrama, meticulously true to history.”

Others agree. The title has a 96% Fresh rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, representing the highest score of Guadagnino’s career across 11 feature film releases. Garfield has been catapulted to the front of the best supporting actor race, thanks to a performance that delivers “a masterclass in diabolical villainy,” according to another review.

The notices, the standing ovations, the awards buzz — all of it represents a stunning reversal of fortune for Guadagnino after the Amazon debacle in June. It was highly uncommon, in Hollywood terms, for even a tech-owned content studio to kill a project it had cradled since infancy. Neon rescued the movie with a global rights deal shortly after the Amazon rift.

“We believe that ‘Artificial’ will be better served if it were released by a different studio,” the e-commerce giant said at the time. Global press almost unanimously noted that the decision to jettison the movie came only three months after Amazon signed a significant partnership with Altman’s OpenAI (including a $50 billion investment in the company).

But, per Variety’s sources, the writing is on the wall. Nothing was wrong with “Artificial,” and the response underlines the dubiousness of Amazon’s decision to drop it.

“Wasn’t this supposed to be god-awful?” wondered one film executive at a rival studio. The exec didn’t just raise an eyebrow at Amazon MGM, but at other legacy distributors who were in the mix to take the project before Neon won out. “A reaction this strong just shows you, every studio pretending the film wasn’t releasable is just conflicted out by their own investments in AI.”

In July, New York magazine published a piece citing individuals close to the project as saying it “lacked theater-worthy criteria.” That doesn’t quite track with early audience response. In fact, the critical consensus is that “Artificial” — not Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning,” which debuted last weekend via Sony Pictures — is a worthy spiritual successor to David Fincher’s “The Social Network.” It’s hard to imagine Amazon not being pleased with this response had it kept “Artificial.”

Interestingly, Amazon’s headaches at the intersection of talent and AI are not exclusive to the Guadagnino movie. At New York Comic Con last weekend, actor Nicolas Cage made waves when he disclosed that he refused to sign a document permitting the studio to use AI in and around his likeness on its now-canceled original series “Spider-Noir.”

“I am not an AI-friendly actor. I’m not a member of their club. I didn’t sign the waiver,” Cage said. “I’m probably not going to be working with that studio again.” There’s a bit more to this story, insiders close to “Spider-Noir” said. Cage was referring to a form from the show’s producer, Sony Pictures Television, considered “industry standard” on content shoots. The waiver gives the studio permission to create a duplicate of an actor in costume, which aids in VFX work during postproduction. Actors are free to opt out, and the form is said to be in line with SAG-AFTRA guidelines.

But it won’t be the end of talent bristling over the coming AI revolution — at Amazon or elsewhere. One creative team member on an Amazon MGM series tells Variety that AI training is a requirement on the lot these days.

The source describes a “mandatory and perfunctory meeting” with the company’s AI team, billed as standard workplace education that corporations regularly hold around sexual harassment and fire safety. The AI group spent an hour pitching the creatives on a suite of products it referred to as “tools.” Our source says, however, it became clear that these tools could “eliminate entire jobs” on the production. Amazon MGM declined to comment on the matter.

More telling, per the source, is that the show’s corporate stewards from Amazon also sat through the training “stone-faced.” While the individual won’t name the execs in attendance, they found it “collectively embarrassing for everyone to be doing this, including on the Amazon side.” A source with direct knowledge of Amazon’s process said such meetings are not mandatory, and humans guide every part of the process related to the tools.

And so begins the great sacrifice the major studios are about to make in service of computer-based cost efficiencies and the “move fast and break things” bravado of Silicon Valley. Time will tell if a prompt can make content that’s as buzzy and well positioned as “Artificial.”