Puck's Belloni Tells Wired AI Is Now Everyday in Hollywood

The most useful line in Wired's Big Interview conversation with Puck's Matthew Belloni is the plainest one: AI has quietly become part of everyday filmmaking, and the battle now isn't whether Hollywood will use the technology, it's who will control it. That reframing matters, because most of the industry's public choreography still pretends the question is open.

Belloni's exhibit A is the movie that almost wasn't. Amazon MGM had backed Artificial, a Luca Guadagnino film with Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati, Mark Rylance as Geoffrey Hinton, and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk. Then Amazon struck a reported $50 billion deal with OpenAI, and the studio dropped the finished film from its slate. Belloni's read, and it is the one his own reporting supports, is that no major corporation with a strategic AI partner wanted to release a movie a source described to him as 'so critical of Altman and the AI race' that 'no major corporation would take a chance on it.' He has called it 'Social Network kind of on steroids.' Neon eventually acquired the US rights.

The reason this piece of gossip is really a story about AI, not about Altman, is that it shows studios are no longer neutral platforms for creative product. Once a distributor is also a customer or partner of a large AI company, its editorial decisions start to bend around that relationship. That is a different structural position from the one the studios were in five years ago, and it will shape what gets greenlit, not just what gets shelved.

The honest caveat is that a lot of the specifics come from a single reporter's sourcing on a single film, and Wired's format here is a podcast conversation, not an investigation. Belloni doesn't give a full accounting of how deep AI already sits inside actual production pipelines, what contract language covers disclosure, or how the guilds plan to respond next round. Take the 'everyone is doing it' framing as an insider's read of the room, not a documented survey.

The opening, if you are building or selling into this world, is the control question Belloni keeps circling. If the majors are increasingly captured by their tech partners on the distribution side, leverage moves to whoever owns the tools filmmakers actually reach for, and to independents like Neon who can still say yes to the projects the majors will not touch.