Artificial premieres October 5 at New York Film Festival

Artificial will have its first public screening on October 5, 2026, at Alice Tully Hall during the 64th New York Film Festival.

IMDb Movies & TV Download

Luca Guadagnino directed the $40 million drama, with Andrew Garfield playing Sam Altman. Monica Barbaro stars as Mira Murati, Yura Borisov plays Ilya Sutskever, Ike Barinholtz takes on Elon Musk, and the screenplay is by Simon Rich.

The film focuses on the five-day stretch in November 2023 when Altman was pushed out of OpenAI, then brought back almost right away. So this isn’t a full cradle-to-grave biopic. It’s a tight corporate thriller built around one very strange week.

Artificial is being positioned as a biographical comedy-drama, and New York Film Festival artistic director Dennis Lim described it as a portrait shaped by clear-eyed horror, dark humor, and existential urgency.

Part of the attention around the movie comes from how it landed at Neon. The distributor picked up Artificial after Amazon MGM dropped it in June 2026, reportedly when the film was close to finished, not long after Amazon’s reported $50 billion partnership with OpenAI. Coverage at the time centered on speculation about how Sam Altman and Elon Musk would be portrayed.

If you followed the OpenAI power struggle, this premiere probably goes on the list. Your first chance to see Artificial will be in New York, at the festival.