In a rare acquisition, Netflix has bought InterPositive, a start-up founded by Ben Affleck that makes AI-powered tools for filmmakers.
Terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed. The entire 16-person InterPositive team of engineers, researchers and creatives will join Netflix through the acquisition, and Affleck will serve as a senior adviser to Netflix to provide ongoing guidance.
While Netflix historically is more often a builder than a buyer, the company said it saw Affleck’s InterPositive as providing a unique set of AI tools that “keeps filmmakers at the center of the process.” Netflix will offer access to InterPositive’s tech to its creative partners and does not have plans to sell it commercially in the marketplace.
Affleck’s L.A.-based company, which has been in stealth mode since he founded it in 2022, does not produce generative AI videos à la OpenAI’s Sora. “It’s not about text-prompting or generating something from nothing,” Affleck said about InterPositive’s approach in a video that Netflix shared with the acquisition announcement (watch below). “AI, people mostly think of it as making something from nothing: ‘I’m gonna type something into a computer and it’s gonna give me a movie.’ That’s not what this is.”
The InterPositive system builds an AI model based on an existing production’s dailies, then lets a filmmaker introduce that model into the postproduction process to provide the ability to do things like mix and color, relight shots, and add visual effects, Affleck explained.
News of Netflix’s acquisition of Affleck’s AI company comes one week after the streaming giant exited its bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery’s studios and streaming businesses. Netflix opted to not make a counteroffer after Paramount Skydance upped its hostile bid for WBD by $1/share, to a winning offer of $31/share.
Bela Bajaria, Netflix’s chief content officer, said InterPositive’s AI technology will provide its partners “more choices, more control and more protection for their vision.”
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“Our relationship with artists has always been grounded in trust: supporting the full range of their creativity and ensuring they have the power to decide how their films and shows are made,” Bajaria said in a statement. “We believe new tools should expand creative freedom, not constrain it or replace the work of writers, directors, actors and crews. Ben and his team at InterPositive are part of a long tradition in our industry of artists leading the way in how innovation is used in storytelling. Their work is about giving filmmakers more choices, more control and more protection for their vision. We’re excited to build on that legacy together, with creators and their artistic intentions at the center of everything we do.”
Elizabeth Stone, chief product and technology officer at Netflix, said that generally speaking, generative AI video platforms available today don’t operate from the perspective of a filmmaker. She said the InterPositive tools are designed to help filmmakers produce higher-quality content — that it’s not about making films or TV shows faster or cheaper.
“Our approach to AI has always been focused on meaningfully serving the needs of the creative community and our members,” said Stone. “The InterPositive team is joining Netflix because of our shared belief that innovation should empower storytellers, not replace them. InterPositive’s impressive technology is purpose-built for filmmakers and showrunners to work with tools that naturally support their creative visions and how they want to bring them to life. We’re excited to welcome the InterPositive team to Netflix and continue building towards a future of entertainment where technology plays a part in how stories are made, but people — and their ideas, craft and judgment — remain at the core of great storytelling.”
Affleck, in an account provided by Netflix, detailed the InterPositive origin story. “In 2022, I spent a lot of time observing the early rise of AI in production,” he said. “As a filmmaker, I could see how these models came up short. For artists to apply these tools towards telling the stories we dedicate our lives to, they need to be purpose-built to represent and protect all the qualities that make a great story: the nuances of filmmaking, the predictable — and unpredictable — challenges of production environments, the distortion of a lens or the way light shape-shifts across a scene.”
Affleck continued, “We also need to preserve what makes storytelling human, which is judgment. The kind that takes decades to build, experience to hone and that only people can have. I knew I had a responsibility to my peers and our industry, to protect the power of human creativity and the people behind it.”
InterPositive began filming a proprietary dataset on a controlled soundstage “with all the familiarities of a full production,” according to Affleck. “I wanted to build a workflow that captures what happens on a set, with vocabulary that matched the language cinematographers and directors already spoke and included the kind of consistency and controls they would expect.”
The start-up’s first AI model was trained to understand “visual logic and editorial consistency,” while preserving cinematic rules under real-world production challenges such as missing shots, background replacements or incorrect lighting, Affleck said. “We also built in restraints to protect creative intent, so the tools are designed for responsible exploration while keeping creative decisions in the hands of artists — and ensuring that the benefits of this technology flow directly back to the story they’re trying to tell.”
Affleck added, “I couldn’t be happier for this work to continue with the team at Netflix, and look forward to providing the broader creative community with access to what we build and the future we’re working towards together.”
Watch the Netflix video with Affleck discussing InterPositive and AI with Bajaria and Stone:
From Variety US