Let me explain exactly why Amazon would rather hand a finished, well-tested film to a rival studio than release it themselves.
Artificial is done. Guadagnino directed it, Garfield plays Altman, and the L.A. screenings got a warm reception. This is the same director whose last movie, Challengers, did about $90M worldwide. On pure commercial logic you release this: an awards-season prestige drama landing while AI is the only story anyone's paying attention to. It prints money.
Now look at the other side of the ledger.
In February, Amazon committed $50B to OpenAI: $15B up front, $35B more if conditions are met, with AWS becoming the exclusive third-party cloud for OpenAI's frontier models. That last clause recurs for years and runs into the billions annually. Bezos and Altman are close enough that Altman showed up to his wedding.
So run the trade. Best case, releasing the film clears Amazon a few tens of millions after theatrical splits and marketing. The downside it creates: an unsympathetic portrait of your $50B partner playing in theaters worldwide right as that relationship scales.
Here's the tell. Amazon greenlit this knowing exactly what it was. They saw every early iteration of the script before Guadagnino even boarded. Then February happened. The same asset that was a green light in 2024 turned into a liability the moment Altman became the counterparty on a $50B deal and AWS's biggest new customer.
Walking away from a $40M film to protect a relationship worth a thousand times that is the easiest call in the building. The trade was never even close.
a YC founder i'm working with was worried because one customer had already built a simple version of his product in-house.
i told him that's not a bad sign, and it's actually the best proof point he has.
if a company is spending expensive engineering time on the problem you're solving, that validates a bunch of things at once:
- the pain is very real
- other vendors are not good enough
- many companies likely have the same pain too
@petergyang low ROI - easier to scale up olympic sports from govt effort and private sponsors care more about whats popular -- cricket in india and maybe badminton in china?
Stanford grads walk out as Google CEO Sundar Pichai takes the stage as commencement speaker. No mention of AI, unlike other uni speakers getting booed down this year. Story for @sfgate shortly
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