Richard Osman has said that American popular culture is under the control of “billionaires” who all have “quite thin skins” after Amazon chose to pull its Sam Altman film.
Earlier this week, Amazon MGM made headlines by scrapping the almost-finished Luca Guadagnino film Artificial, which stars Andrew Garfield as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The studio and streamer announced that it was no longer partnering with Guadagnino on the movie, which is said to have dramatised the brief period when Altman was suddenly ousted as OpenAI’s CEO in 2023 before being rehired.
Aside from Garfield, the stellar cast includes Top Gun: Maverick’s Monica Barbaro as OpenAI’s former chief technology officer Mira Murati, Anora’s Yura Borisov as chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and comedian Ike Barinholtz as co-founder Elon Musk.
While Amazon said in a statement that it believes Artificial “will be better served if it were released by a different studio”, it was reported by Puck last week that the move came after Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, watched a cut of the film which proved to be “markedly darker” in tone than expected.
Richard Osman and Marina Hyde discussed Amazon’s decision to pull the film on the latest episode of their podcast, The Rest is Entertainment – with the pair highlighting Amazon’s recent partnership with OpenAI that was announced back in February. Amazon contributed almost half of OpenAI’s record-breaking $110bn funding round that month by investing $50bn in the company.
Speaking about the film and how it is yet to be picked up by another distributor, Osman said: “It’s interesting who is passing on it because a lot of people have passed on it. If you believe the trade papers, A24 passed on it. Netflix have passed on it.
“So whatever Amazon is worried about showing Sam Altman in that light or Elon Musk in that light, other people seem to be as well because people are saying it’s not a bad movie, but almost everybody is passing on it. And that’s almost more depressing.”
He later added on the podcast, released on Tuesday (23 June): “We are 100 per cent definitely in an era where American popular culture is under the yoke of about five people, all of whom are billionaires and all of whom have quite thin skins.”
Meanwhile, co-presenter and journalist Hyde said that she knows writers whose projects about tech barons that are yet to see the light of day.
“After the election of [US President Donald] Trump in 2024, a lot of these big companies called those people who had those projects and said, ‘Don't worry, we're still going to carry on with them, OK?’ I haven’t seen any of those projects come out,” she said.
“They are not even green lit. These are not sort of small spec script writers. These are people with big overall deals who are tackling the big subjects, the big people of the age. People are saying to them, ‘Have you got anything that isn't about Elon Musk?’ Have you got something different?’”
Hyde added that she’s worried creators are living through “a period of self-censorship”.
“It’s just a different calculus when people are talking about, ‘We can’t make this project because of our cloud partnerships.’ This is something we haven’t been thinking about before but you can see it across all sorts of things.”
The Independent has contacted Amazon for comment.
Releasing a statement on Friday 19 June about dropping Artificial, Amazon wrote: “We have the utmost respect and admiration for Luca Guadagnino as an award-winning filmmaker – not to mention a longstanding relationship that we hope to continue.”
“We believe that Artificial will be better served if it were released by a different studio and are working closely with the filmmaking team to find the film a new home.”
Artificial was penned by former Saturday Night Live writer Simon Rich, while Cooper Koch, Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Billie Lourd, Chris O’Dowd and Mark Rylance are among those in the wider cast.
