Amazon Won’t Release Its Sam Altman Movie. Will Anyone?

0:00This episode is brought to you by Netflix, presenting Beef, from creator, writer, and director Lee Sung-jin. The new installment of the eight-time Emmy-winning anthology series features powerhouse performances from Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Charles Melton, Kaylee Spaney, and legendary Korean actors Yoon Ye-jung and Song Kang-ho. Esquire raves its hands-down the best TV show of the year, and IGN hails it a masterpiece. Lee Sung-jin's series remains an untouchable force. Beef, for your Emmy Awards consideration.

0:37This episode of The Town is presented by HBO Max. For your awards consideration, Max presents Hacks, the Emmy Award-winning series starring Gene Smart and Hannah Einbinder. In the aftermath of mistaken news reports that Debra passed away, she and Ava returned to Las Vegas determined to secure Debra's legacy as a comedian. Don't miss the series Variety is calling one of TV's best comedies ever. Hacks is streaming on HBO Max. Watch now. It is Monday, June 22nd. I broke some news last week in my Puck newsletter that has definitely reverberated around town and beyond. Amazon MGM Studios, the Hollywood arm of the big tech company, they decided to drop an already shot movie called Artificial, directed by the award-winning filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, about OpenAI and its leader, Sam Altman.

1:24Why would they do this? Well, Amazon isn't saying exactly, but I read an early draft of the script for Artificial, and it's definitely not a flattering portrait of one of the most powerful figures in technology. In fact, it's pretty scathing, with Allman presented as a duplicitous backstabber who takes an altruistic nonprofit and perverts it to amass power and wealth for himself, potentially disastrous consequences for the world. Amazon told me in a statement on Thursday, quote, 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.

1:59Okay, very nice of them. But why does a studio abruptly dump a$40 million movie with big stars like Andrew Garfield and Monica Barbaro that it didn't seem to have a problem with a year ago when it greenlit the property? I did write in my newsletter last year that I'm, quote, honestly a little surprised that Amazon would make this movie. But they did, and now a cold feet. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Amazon recently did a$50 billion deal with OpenAI, one that was announced in February. As part of that deal, Amazon Web Services will be the, quote, exclusive third-party cloud distribution partner for OpenAI Frontier.

2:35So it seems pretty simple, right? Or is it? And now CAA is trying to place artificial at another studio. And as of this taping, several of the majors have passed, including Netflix, A24, and Focus Features. I talked to one potential buyer this past weekend who saw the film and said, it's so critical of Altman and the AI race, There's no way a major corporation will take a chance on it. So is this movie just not great and not worth it for Amazon or these other companies? Or what does it say about the power of movie studios these days? Is big tech now off limits? And if so, what else is off limits?

3:10That's today's show. Our usual Monday guy, Lucas, is off this week for his wedding. So we've got Keech Hagee. In addition to being a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, she wrote a book last year about Sam Altman and OpenAI called The Optimist, Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future. We're going to get into the artificial controversy, why Amazon feels it can't release this movie, and the bigger question, who, if anyone, will? From The Ringer and Puck, I'm Matt Bellany, and this is The Town.

3:39Okay, we are here with Keach Hagee, who's a reporter at The Wall Street Journal and the author of The Optimist, a book about Sam Altman and the founding and the popularization of open AI. Hi, welcome, Keech. Thanks for having me. Okay, the reason I wanted you on the show today is because people in Hollywood look at this and they freak out. When will my movie get scrapped to please some tech oligarch? So let's first contextualize this by explaining Amazon's relationship with OpenAI and with Anthropic and other AI companies, including their own efforts in that regard.

4:24Keach Hagey:So Amazon is an increasingly important partner for OpenAI. Sort of a recent partner, right? And OpenAI famously had this long relationship with Microsoft that felt a little tight for them. They wanted other options. And so they made this deal with Amazon to basically use their cloud infrastructure. And OpenAI is paying Amazon, right? Like$50 billion or something to use their cloud infrastructure. But this allows OpenAI to access government work, Pentagon work. Remember that whole fight a few weeks, months ago with Anthropic and the Pentagon? What helped OpenAI kind of snatch that contract away from Anthropic was the Amazon deal, right?

5:03Keach Hagey:Because Amazon is right there with the intelligence community. Amazon seems to be pretty friendly with the Trump administration. They released the Melania movie and Bezos has made frequent trips there, although Trump has recently been quoted as making fun of the texts that he's gotten from Bezos and Zuckerberg and others. But Amazon is pretty cozy with the administration. I think that's fair to say. Even beyond this administration, right, Amazon has been right there as like the bedrock is what a lot of government folks do their work on. And that is what OpenAI needed that relationship in order to be able to really access government work.

5:37Keach Hagey:So they had to do this deal with Amazon. And it's increasingly important partner for them. They ticked off their longtime partner, Microsoft, by getting kind of more in bed with Amazon. And I think it's like the future of OpenAI is like Amazon is an increasingly important part. Although it's weird because Amazon is also a very important partner of their rival, Anthropic, an earlier partner of theirs. And, you know, we've seen some very wild stuff in the last couple of weeks, right, where Annie Jassy of Amazon was the one who called up the Trump administration and said, oh, you know, Anthropic's mythos model or, you know, fable model is not safe and got it taken down.

6:14Keach Hagey:Kind of a strange thing for a partner to do to their partner. Well, unless you have a bigger, more powerful partner. I did raise an eyebrow. All right. So into this dynamic drops this movie project, Artificial, which I wrote last summer when Amazon picked up this movie and started casting it. I was surprised. I literally wrote in my Puck newsletter. I'm honestly surprised that Amazon would go for this because it did. It does touch so many third rails right now about what's going on with big tech. and I've read the script and I looked at it and I was like, this is not a flattering portrait of Sam Altman.

6:56It is social network kind of on steroids because you add in the fact that not only are these guys warping the culture, they could potentially end the world. And that's the message of this movie. I talked to someone who saw it this past weekend, one of the potential buyers who said, it is grim. It is dark. It goes there and makes you feel bad after watching it about the future of the human race. And the fact that Amazon signed up gleefully for this last summer, what changed between then and now is the question. And the only thing that really changed is this big OpenAI deal that they did.

7:38Keach Hagey:Look, it's certainly true that those optics are there, right? They are. But, you know, I also was familiar with the script. like it was about a year ago that I saw it. And it seemed to me like someone had taken, I mean, Simon Rich, great, like funny writer, but had taken like the most emotionally salient part of the entire blip, which was when Ilya Satsukovar flipped. Yeah. Right. He had been, he like voted to the Alstom Altman and then like over the weekend, just like changed his mind. And that was, that was insane. That was story-wise. And keep in mind, just to say, The story takes place during this period in 2023 when Altman was briefly fired as the CEO.

8:21And Altman is portrayed in the movie as being altruistic in the beginning. And they were all on board. AI is going to help the world. And Altman betrays them in the script and essentially takes control and changes it to a for-profit enterprise for his own benefit.

8:40Keach Hagey:Right. Right. And so on one hand, I totally understand why you would choose, like, it was kind of told through Iliad Southkeeper as the main character, which was an interesting and I thought kind of clever choice. But it was like someone who had read the news stories and had no inside knowledge of what actually happened and then just kind of like, you know, created like fictional connective tissue between a few data points, which I guess is okay. But that connective tissue was like, you know, it was just imaginary, like imaginary darkness. And I remember coming away thinking like, this lily did not need gilding.

9:10Keach Hagey:You know what I mean? Like it was totally a wild, super dramatic story on its own. There was no reason to like overlay this like fictional, even worse frame on top of it. So it's not 100 % accurate in the opinion of someone who has written a book about Sam Altman. Correct. Correct. And honestly, that could play a role because I remember during the social network fracas with Sony and at the time Facebook, that was their whole argument. They're like, yeah, the entire point of the movie is about Mark Zuckerberg creating Facebook to get a girlfriend when he was dating Priscilla, his eventual wife, during this entire period.

9:50So the entire premise that Aaron Sorkin built the narrative on in Facebook's view was a flawed premise. Now, I covered that at the time, and they went back and forth, and they gave them the script in advance, and they tried to work with Facebook. And ultimately, Zuckerberg kind of laid off and said, oh, we're, you know, they had a screening of the movie and they kind of took it as a joke. But I think that that movie did do damage to Facebook. The fact that it was good, that it won Oscars, that it was, it sort of created in the public's mindset, this image of Mark Zuckerberg as this maniacal kind of, you know, nerd who wants to take over the world.

10:33and if I'm Sam Altman, I'm looking at that and then I'm looking at this movie saying, am I going to get social networked here? Now, Sam participated in your book. Do you think he's the kind of guy that would make a call and shut this down?

10:45Keach Hagey:I can see how he wouldn't like this movie, right? I mean, it's pretty hard to come away from that script. Like, he's painted as a monster in the script that I read. And not just a monster creating a social network, a monster creating something that could potentially destroy the world. Right. I mean, it's like stakes could not be higher, right? So sure, I could see how he wouldn't like it. I have no inside knowledge about what he did or why this was killed. I honestly don't. And for the record, my sources involved in this say that he didn't make a call. Now, who knows if that's true? Who knows how this happened?

11:18But knowing Amazon as you do, how big a deal do you think this was? Because my sources at the studio are saying this was Mike Hopkins' decision. He is the head of Prime Video. he saw this movie it had taken a darker turn than they had anticipated and they decided that it was not in the best interest of the company to release this movie so they're going to help find it another distributor do you think seattle got involved here i i really have no knowledge

11:46Keach Hagey:about that i mean it is possible the movie just like wasn't that good true right i mean others have passed on it since then so right but amazon releases a lot of movies that aren't very good Some would argue the majority of their movies. But the question, what you're saying is that it wasn't worth it. That if this had hit the bullseye and was the social network, they would have made the bet. But since it's not, then it becomes, is this worth damaging our relationship here for a company that we have a$50 billion deal in, in an industry in which we have hundreds of billions of dollars at stake? Right.

12:25Keach Hagey:If no Oscars are going to be coming your way in this case, you know, like maybe not worth it. Yeah. And honestly, this is what happened two years ago with the Donald Trump movie, The Apprentice, which premiered at Cannes and got a huge response there. And I talked to people at the time there who said, yeah, it's fine. It's good. It's not worth it. It's not worth poking that bear for this movie. And ultimately, I think they were kind of proved wrong because it got two Oscar nominations for actor and supporting actor. and the distributor that picked it up, Tom Hortenberg's company, they didn't get a lot of box office out of it, but they did pretty well on P-Bod.

13:02It turned into a good movie for them. But that was an instance of the fear factor throughout Hollywood, just nudging them towards the side of not worth it. And ultimately, that's the big issue here. If none of these other companies are willing to pick it up, and so far, as we are taping, The big studios have passed on this. Netflix, Focus Features. Disney was never going to do this. A24. A24 is an interesting one because they do release movies like this, but they have, as a big investor, Thrive Capital, who is also a big investor in open AI. So they were never going to do this movie. It will likely go to a Neon or a Mubi or one of those distributors that is small, independent.

13:48Maybe Ortenberg's company will pick this one up as well. That's not Amazon. And if that is the future of movies that touch these third rails, I think people in Hollywood are going to be pissed about this. It's really disappointing. Just today, A24 did this AI deal with Google, where Google is going to invest$75 million to create AI tools for filmmakers.

14:13Keach Hagey:Certainly, since your scoop, like last Thursday, I think, whatever that was, like all my sources, this is what all that anyone wants to talk about, right? And there's this fear of a chilling effect and like, oh, God, now the tech guys are have taken over Hollywood. Right. Like that. I've had a couple of conversations like that. I'm not sure if this specific movie is the example to make that broader claim, just given like the creative issues. I agree with you I think the fact that Sony is going ahead with the social reckoning the sequel to social network which I know they're downplaying this but does connect Zuckerberg and Meta to January 6th and the issues that were raised around that with people organizing on Facebook and misinformation I think that that is a good sign Facebook and Meta are not the same company as they were in 2009, 2010.

15:06They're much more powerful. I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg's comms, he's yelling at his comms people, like, how come we can't get this movie killed? What do we got to do? We got to be a bigger player in AI for Hollywood to be afraid of us.

15:18Keach Hagey:I mean, that's not to cross my mind, right? And the fact that that movie is being made, like, suggests that, like, maybe, you know, it's not quite as grim as people think. I don't know. I do think there's a big chilling effect here, don't you? I mean, the studios haven't made a major movie with a North Korean or Chinese villain since the interview fiasco at Sony. And Michael Linton, the former head of Sony, came on this show and said that making the interview was the biggest mistake he made at Sony. So the message to the rest of Hollywood is, is don't be like me. Don't greenlight these risky movies that could potentially blow up in your face.

15:55And Hollywood has become consumed with risk management. So none of these executives are going to see this and be like, oh, I want to place my reputation and my job on something that could potentially cause my parent company to have a major problem. And it's not just open AI. It's any of these big tech companies, I think. If there is something that touches this third rail of AI dominance or big tech dominance, I think all these companies are going to take a hard look and probably pass. This episode is brought to you by Peacock, presenting the hit reality competition series, The Traitors, for your Emmy consideration.

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18:04Keach Hagey:There are two different things going on here. One is like this particular movie was like really personal, right? So there's a difference between like a movie that like criticizes AI and it's critical broadly. And one that is like maybe like tiptoeing up to certain lines of defamation, right? about like living people. So that's one, right? It's just, I think we could still have entertainment that like criticizes the tech's power without maybe that. But I also think that there's like a lot of money that they're leaving on the table if you're right. Because all the polling that's out there is there's a lot of concern about AI.

18:44Yeah, all the polls suggest the public has turned on AI. They don't like it. They don't want data centers. They don't want it in their lives. Right.

18:51Keach Hagey:So you would think there would be a broad audience actually out there and money to be made to harness that in the right way. So there are really two issues here, though, because obviously, free speech, any company can decide what movie to make or not make. These companies that passed on it, fine. More power to you. Make what you want to make. Don't make what you don't want to. But the question is, once you agree to make a movie, the pact within Hollywood has always been you back the artist and you see it through. And even if it doesn't work out, most movies don't work out exactly as you want it to.

19:27You back the artist. And will there be backlash now if this movie either doesn't come out or gets buried? because the nightmare scenario here for Amazon is that nobody picks up this movie. They are left with it. And then they have to make the decision whether they bury it, kill it, or whether they essentially pay another company to release it.

19:52Keach Hagey:Yeah, none of those options are great, right? I mean, they're already going to give them a discount. They're like, this is a$40 million movie. Any distributor that picks it up is likely going to get a boost from Amazon to take it. So it's going to be a discount from what you would normally pay for a hot button movie with Andrew Garfield from an award-winning filmmaker like Luca Guadagnino. So good for them if they can do it. But again, maybe they won't. And maybe Amazon will be stuck with this. And then I guess the question is, can Amazon withstand blowback from the creative community for this kind of thing?

20:29No one's asked Denis Villeneuve what he thinks of this. He's directing James Bond for them. No one's asked Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who just directed Project Hail Mary and is about to embark on an Oscar campaign for that movie. Every single thing they do, they're going to get asked, what do you think of Amazon killing their Sam Altman movie? And I guarantee they're going to have an opinion. All of a sudden, this snowballs into Amazon not being creator-friendly, and that hurts them down the line. I do think it does.

20:58Keach Hagey:It is a real risk, and maybe to your point, right? The best outcome is for them finding a safe home that is not quite censorship. Yeah, not quite censorship. That's the goal here. Because ultimately, we are headed into this world where most of the Hollywood studios are going to have been consolidated by big tech. If you just look at the landscape, Warner Brothers and Paramount are going to be owned by Oracle money. Netflix was incubated in Silicon Valley and is more tech company than it is Hollywood company. Disney has relationships with OpenAI and others, and if they want to be a player in this world, they're going to have to deal with these companies.

21:42Same with Universal and Comcast, when they are headed into this world where they have to compete with these companies. Amazon, obviously. Apple, obviously. Sony is owned by a Japanese technology company. doesn't leave a whole lot left. I mentioned A24, even the indies doesn't leave a whole lot left.

22:02Keach Hagey:And these are the conversations that your scoop sparked for me and my sources over the weekend, right? This exact thing that like, it kind of woke everyone up like, oh my God, like the tech guys have completely taken over. All this consolidation leaves us with basically content having very little power, which is a theme I know you've covered on this pod, right? A lot. And I do think that that is like part of the broader thing. What do we do about it? Is there an opportunity here for an upstart to be the non-compromised distribution platform or studio? If you have a fearless, a brand of like must see fearlessness and you can make creators flock to you and the distributors have no choice but to, you know, to buy it because that's what audiences want.