Artificial will open in theaters on Christmas Day, bringing a dramatized account of Sam Altman's 2023 firing and five-day reinstatement to a mass audience just three years after the events. The first trailer presents the movie as a tense, horror-tinged portrait rather than a conventional corporate biopic, and it anchors that tone on Andrew Garfield's depiction of the OpenAI chief.
Directed by Luca Guadagnino, the film uses unsettling music and imagery to frame key moments. In the trailer Garfield, as Altman, adopts a measured, almost robotic cadence while praising artificial intelligence, at one point calling it Pandora's Box and warning that "countries will fall" and "industries are gonna collapse." The footage pairs those lines with shots of a room stocked with weapons and other grim visuals, and it alternates scenes of triumph with moments of anguish, including a sequence of the character screaming into a void.
Artificial dramatizes the abrupt boardroom crisis of 2023, when Altman was removed and then reinstated at OpenAI five days later. The cast includes Yura Borisov, Monica Barbaro, Ike Barinholtz, Jason Schwartzman and Mark Rylance, alongside Garfield. Guadagnino's previous films include Call Me by Your Name, Challengers and a Suspiria remake, credentials the trailer leans on to sell the film's stylized approach.
The picture's path to release was uneven. Amazon MGM had been set to distribute the film but stepped away after having invested $50 billion into OpenAI. Netflix, A24 and Focus also declined to release the movie, before Neon signed on as distributor. That history left the project in doubt for a time, making Neon’s decision to take it to theaters on a major holiday a notable outcome.
The trailer sets expectations for a film that foregrounds spectacle and dread as much as boardroom drama. With a release timed for Christmas Day, Artificial now heads into awards season and the holiday box office with a provocative tone and a high-profile cast, leaving questions about how audiences and critics will respond to this version of a very recent Silicon Valley crisis.
