The Hollywood Reporter reports:

If Universal opts against releasing the movie, it would mark an extraordinary reversal at a moment when media companies are already under scrutiny for bowing to various forms of political pressure. Amazon backed out of releasing Artificial as it got into business with Sam Altman’s OpenAI, while ABC News and Paramount/CBS News each paid millions to settle lawsuits with the Trump administration many legal experts felt would be quickly dismissed.

Universal would be required to pay filmmakers a kill fee not to release the movie, according to a person familiar with the deal’s structure. The filmmakers would then be free to sell it anew, essentially allowing it to profit twice off the same rights sale.

The film would not struggle to be seen around the world no matter what happens. Distributors in individual countries have been salivating over the film ever since the four-hour project began gaining buzz in recent weeks, first with a THR cover story and then with the Venice and Toronto festival premieres, but were, of course, told it was spoken for, and many would likely jump at a fresh chance to buy it. Still, the specter of yet another media giant paying a bounty to avoid angering people on the right while also shelving a project for no legitimate creative reason would surely raise questions about the ability of conglomerates to protect free speech in an era when it is already under assault.

Musk is a politically explosive film that alleges, among other things, that its subject could be using data gathered during his DOGE period against Democrats in the upcoming U.S. election. In the film, Gibney includes comments from Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning godfather of AI, describing how that could play out. “It’s fairly clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections,” he says onscreen. “If you wanted to corrupt those midterm elections and you wanted to use AI, all you needed to do was get detailed information on U.S. citizens. And what DOGE did looked like just what you would do.” [Continue reading…]