Luca Guadagnino says it wasn’t a surprise that Amazon MGM dropped the nearly finished Sam Altman film industrial Shortly after Amazon announced a $50 billion investment in OpenAI.
“I can’t say much because we are in the middle of this situation,” Guadagnino told Italian television.[but] These industrial policies are certainly not new.
Speaking to the news programme Otto and Mizo On the Italian network La7, Guadagnino cited a 2003 incident when CBS canceled the broadcast of the program Regana miniseries about President Ronald Reagan and his family, starring Josh Brolin and Judy Davis, was released after backlash from conservatives. (The series eventually aired on CBS sister network Showtime.)
The Italian director could have cited a more recent example, Ali Abbasi’s 2024 film Donald Trump traineewhich premiered at Cannes but was snubbed by studio and independent distributors, before finally landing with Tom Ortenberg’s indie outfit Briarcliff Entertainment.
However, neither of these are direct companies of industrial Attitude. Amazon pulled out of Guadagnino’s film shortly after announcing a $50 billion strategic partnership with OpenAI, a deal that will see the two companies jointly build custom AI models for Amazon’s internal engineering teams. When Amazon dropped it, $40 million for Guadagnino Social network– The featurette was nearing completion and was expected to premiere at one of the fall film festivals.
He is now forgotten. CAA Media Finance, which represents Guadagnino, has pitched the film to potential buyers but several of the usual suspects — Netflix, Focus Features and Warner Bros. The hour and A24 were reported to have passed. At this point, Moby, who released Guadagnino gayis considered the most likely buyer.
Although he did not speak directly about Amazon MGM’s situation, Guadagnino did issue a warning about AI, or rather, the companies controlling the technology and its use around the world.
“For me, the issue is not artificial intelligence per se, what matters most to me is people,” the director said. “It is changing the entire face of society — not just the face of society in terms of consumption and how we engage with these tools, but the face of the identity of a place like the United States and the entire world — with the rise of this small oligarchy that is exercising real radical control.”
