Broadcaster and author Richard Osman has hit out at Amazon after the tech giant pulled the production of the almost-finished Luca Guadagnino film Artificial, which stars Andrew Garfield as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The House of Games host also said that the Amerian popular culture is under the control of "five billionaires who all have quite thin skins".

Earlier this week, Amazon MGM announced that it was no longer partnering with film director Luca Guadagnino, saying that it "will be better served if it were released by a different studio." Netflix, Focus, A24 have passed on acquiring the movie, but a source said Mubi is looking at the project, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Richard discussed the issue with his co-host Marina Hyde on their podcast The Rest Is Entertainment.

He said: "We are 100% definitely in an era where American popular culture is under the yoke of about five people, all of whom are billionaires and all of whom have quite thin skins.

"They are not even green lit. These are not sort of small spec script writers. These are people with big overall deals who are tackling the big subjects, the big people of the age. People are saying to them, 'Have you got anything that isn't about Elon Musk? Have you got something different?'"

A spokesperson for Amazon said: "We have the utmost respect and admiration for Luca Guadagnino as an award-winning filmmaker — not to mention a longstanding relationship that we hope to continue. We believe that Artificial will be better served if it were released by a different studio and are working closely with the filmmaking team to find the film a new home."

The decision to pull the film comes just a few months after news broke that Amazon would invest $50billion in OpenAI as part of a multi-year strategic partnership.

This sparks concerns as Marina described it as a "period of self-censorship". She added: "It's just a different calculus when people are talking about, 'We can’t make this project because of our cloud partnerships.' This is something we haven't been thinking about before but you can see it across all sorts of things."