Andrew Garfield in Sam Altman Biopic Teaser

The first teaser trailer of Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial has been released.

After being dropped by Amazon MGM Studios in June, the biopic of the OpenAI tech executive Sam Altman will be released in the US on 25 December by Neon after it premieres at the New York film festival this October.

In the trailer, Andrew Garfield as Altman walks down the staircase of a luxurious mansion before entering a basement containing dozens of machine guns.

“The future’s inevitable,” says Altman as ominous electronic music plays. “Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse. And we get to be the ones to shepherd people into this new world.”

In a statement earlier this summer, Amazon said that it believed “Artificial will be better served if it were released by a different studio and are working closely with the film-making team to find the film a new home”.

Amazon’s deal with OpenAI will see the Jeff Bezos-owned company investing as much as $35bn in the AI company in the coming months following an initial $15bn investment.

On 30 June, Neon announced that it had acquired Artificial and that the film would be joining its awards season slate. The film follows the abrupt firing and reinstatement of Altman as OpenAI’s CEO amid a fight over who gets to control the technology.

The film also features the Anora actor Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, the co-founder of OpenAI; Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk; and Monica Barbaro and Cooper Hoffman as other Altman colleagues at the company. The ensemble will also include Jason Schwartzman, Chris O’Dowd, Zosia Mamet, Cooper Koch and Billie Lourd.

“I don’t know Sam Altman. I’ve never met him,” Garfield recently told Esquire. “But I think anyone who takes on that level of responsibility for a company or a technology that is going to do a hell of a lot of damage to the soul of humanity [must have] a certain ability to dissociate.”

In a recent red carpet interview with Variety, Hoffman said that he was not surprised that Amazon dropped the film. “I’m shocked they picked it up in the first place,” he said. “When they dropped it, it was kinda like, ‘Oh, yeah, that kinda actually makes sense,’ but then it got picked up by Neon, which I’m so happy about.”

Neon has emerged as a dominant force in awards season in recent years and has helped films including Parasite, Anatomy of a Fall and Anora on their paths to Oscar glory. This year, their awards season slate also includes Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winner Fjord, the James Grey drama Paper Tiger and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden.