Andrew Garfield has barely had time to descend one ominous staircase as Sam Altman and people are already worried Hollywood has made the OpenAI chief too cool.
The first teaser for Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial arrived this week, turning OpenAI’s extraordinary 2023 boardroom implosion into a Christmas release starring Garfield as Altman, Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk. Neon plans to open the film in the US on 25 December after a New York Film Festival premiere, according to The Guardian. No Australian theatrical date has been confirmed.
One complaint has proved unusually revealing: Andrew Garfield is simply too charismatic for this.
Charisma is not the same thing as endorsement
The concern appeared bluntly in discussion around the first images from Artificial. Garfield has spent years playing characters whose intensity draws an audience towards them even when they are frightened, damaged or making terrible decisions. That quality becomes more complicated when the subject is a living technology executive whose company sits at the centre of arguments about jobs, copyright, power and the future of artificial intelligence.
But casting a charismatic actor does not automatically turn a film into corporate fan fiction. Sometimes charisma is the point.
Sam Altman speaking at TED, April 2025 – Credit: Apple Photos Clean Up/Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
Powerful people rarely acquire influence by entering a room with ominous music and announcing that they are the villain. They persuade. They recruit. They make difficult ideas sound inevitable. A film interested in how somebody gains that much institutional power may become less insightful if it refuses to show why other intelligent people followed him.
The real question is what Guadagnino does with Garfield’s appeal once he has our attention.
Artificial has a credibility problem before it opens
The production history makes that question sharper. Amazon MGM originally had the film, then dropped it in June as Amazon was developing a major commercial relationship with OpenAI. Amazon publicly said Artificial would be better served by another studio, and Neon subsequently acquired it. The studio change is confirmed.
The stronger claim—that Amazon killed the film because its OpenAI relationship made the subject uncomfortable—is not publicly established and should not be smuggled into the story as fact.
Still, the appearance of a conflict became part of the film’s narrative before anybody had seen it. A movie about corporate power and the struggle to control transformative technology now has an unusually clean chance to prove its independence.
POPTOPIC has already seen how quickly AI becomes the story when audiences think technology is displacing human creative work, including the backlash surrounding The Block’s generated music and animation. Artificial is entering cinemas with all of that baggage already packed.
Making Sam Altman boring would solve nothing
If Guadagnino responded to scepticism by turning Altman into a humourless Bond villain, the result might make critics feel morally reassured while producing a much less useful film.
The interesting version of Artificial is one where audiences understand why Altman commands loyalty, why colleagues believed the stakes were enormous and why a board could remove a chief executive only to watch the decision collapse spectacularly days later.
That requires people, not avatars for an argument. The teaser’s ominous tone gives little indication that Guadagnino intends to make a cuddly founder story.
The danger is fascination without scrutiny
Hollywood does have a habit of turning difficult men into compelling antiheroes and then acting surprised when audiences buy the poster. That is the risk here.
A beautifully photographed mansion, a handsome movie star and two hours of quotable boardroom warfare can turn criticism into mythology if the film becomes more interested in the brilliance of its central figure than the consequences of the power surrounding him. The same distinction between spectacle and authorship sits beneath POPTOPIC’s look at GPT-6 Astra’s Ableton demonstration: the impressive surface is only the beginning of the argument.
But that verdict belongs after the film, not after the casting announcement. Garfield being magnetic is not Artificial’s mistake. It is its test.
If Guadagnino can make us understand why people might follow Sam Altman without instructing us to admire everything that follows, the casting will have done something far more interesting than mimic a face. If the film merely gives Silicon Valley another handsome antihero to quote on TikTok, the critics will have spotted the problem before Christmas.
About the author
The conversation
Be the first to join the conversation.