At some point, Hollywood decided the world of tech was a nice little well for drama, but it can probably just throw out the latest material that it’s happened into rather than serving it to the rest of us. According to The Hollywood Reporter, we’re going to be getting a movie based on the five-day period that Sam Altman was ousted and ultimately reinstated as the head of OpenAI.
The film, which will reportedly be titled “Artificial,” already has a pretty star-studded call sheet, though everything is still in the rumor period, it seems.
Luca Guadagnino, director of Call Me by Your Name and Challengers, is reportedly in talks to direct the picture. Andrew Garfield is currently the favorite to play Altman, which is very much in his wheelhouse after his performance as Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network. Monica Barbaro, who played Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown, is reportedly in talks to play former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, and Anora breakout star Yura Borisov is up for company co-founder and Altman antagonist Ilya Sutskever. Comedy writer Simon Rich, who wrote for “Saturday Night Live” and created “Miracle Workers,” is reportedly responsible for the screenplay.
One of the problems for Hollywood repeatedly going after these real-life Big Tech dramas is that the industries are now so entangled. This OpenAI flick, for instance, is handled by Amazon MGM Studios. Amazon is about $8 billion deep into investments into OpenAI rival Anthropic. So like, do they have the motivation to trash OpenAI in this thing? (Not that external pressure to do so is necessary, but still.)
And sure, the drama at OpenAI is compelling. It’s not too often that the founder of one of the hottest companies around gets kicked out by the board because they no longer trust him, only for him to be reinstated five days later. And, as stories like the Wall Street Journal’s accounting of the events highlight, there is no shortage of intrigue and backstabbing along the way that will probably play well on the big screen.
But ugh is the list of these Silicon Valley dramas getting long, and it doesn’t feel like it’s really accomplishing much other than pumping the egos of the subjects. The Social Network remains probably the best work the genre has produced (save for HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” which hasn’t aged a day since it came to an end), and even that failed to really capture just how greedy and unethical these people would turn out. (Though, give Aaron Sorkin this, he probably was ahead of the curve on calling out the bro-ish-ness of Zuckerberg that is now on display when he pops up on Joe Rogan’s podcast.)
The rest of the offerings have their charms, to be sure. “The Dropout,” “WeCrashed,” and “Super Pumped” all manage to pull out some great performances and are built around compelling stories. But none of them really sufficiently get at the greed, corruption, and frankly, the disdain for everyone from regulators to actual, regular people who get harmed while these people amass their fortunes. Maybe that’s because the stories typically follow the central figures—the Altmans and Zuckerbergs and Holmeses of the world—from their seats in the C-suites, and they are so rarely confronted with reality there.