Luca Guadagnino's Artificial, a drama built around Sam Altman's brief ousting and return at OpenAI in 2023, had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on Monday 5 October 2026. Early reactions from the screening, gathered by IndieWire, The Hollywood Reporter and TheWrap, are mostly warm. Critics singled out the biting satire, and several said they left as unsettled by the film's vision of an AI-dominated future as they were entertained by its jokes.
“Guadagnino guts Silicon Valley with his obsessive pulse & a powerful farce in which Andrew Garfield completely shines”
@jairojimenez_, viewer, on X, quoted by TheWrap · thewrap.com ↗
The reactions come largely from viewers' posts on X, collected by the trades, so they are first impressions rather than formal reviews. Andrew Garfield plays Altman, with Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati, Cooper Hoffman as Greg Brockman and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk. Jason Schwartzman, Chris O'Dowd, Mark Rylance, Zosia Mamet and Billie Lourd are also in the cast. Simon Rich wrote the script, and David Heyman, Jeffrey Clifford and Jennifer Fox produced it alongside Rich and Guadagnino.
The film's route to the festival was not smooth. Amazon MGM, which had backed Guadagnino before on Challengers and After the Hunt, commissioned it, then dropped the finished picture soon after striking a $50bn cloud deal with OpenAI. Amazon pulled the 19 June release date. Neon bought the film roughly two weeks later, after Netflix and Focus Features had passed. The outlets report the sequence of events and do not quote either company on why the film was dropped.
Another film still from Artificial, supplied by Neon
Neon · Image: The Hollywood Reporter
The money is reported unevenly. The Hollywood Reporter says Neon paid nothing up front but committed $15m to marketing, while TheWrap describes the production as a $40m film. The two accounts differ on the figure, and neither is attributed to Neon or the producers in the pieces read. Some early viewers compare it to The Social Network, rebuilt for a world that seems headed for disaster, and call it a dark comedy about nobody taking responsibility.
The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire and TheWrap all give the same date: Neon will release Artificial in theatres on 25 December 2026 and plans an awards campaign. It lands in the same season as Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning and Alex Gibney's documentary Musk, so the industry's AI leaders are getting several screen portraits at once. One viewer quoted by TheWrap likened it to a sledgehammer in a year when filmmakers keep warning that the end is near. The film's first public showing therefore came at a festival, months after the commercial release Amazon had planned, and with a different distributor behind it.
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