Netflix buys Ben Affleck’s AI filmmaking startup InterPositive

Netflix said on March 5 that it is acquiring InterPositive, the AI filmmaking company founded by Ben Affleck in 2022, with Affleck joining as a senior adviser and the 16‑person team moving to Netflix. The company did not disclose financial terms in its announcement.

Deal price chatter has already emerged: TechCrunch and Variety, citing Bloomberg, reported the acquisition could be worth up to $600 million, structured with a lower upfront payment and performance‑based earn‑outs. Netflix has not confirmed the figure, so the valuation remains an estimate rather than a disclosed number.

InterPositive’s tools are built around production‑specific models trained on a film’s own dailies, aiming to assist post‑production tasks like wire removal, relighting, reframing, and background enhancement, rather than generating synthetic actors. That workflow emphasis, highlighted in the reporting, positions the technology as a utility layer for finishing work rather than a wholesale replacement for creative decision‑making.

The acquisition signals Netflix’s intent to embed AI deeper into its production pipeline, not just distribution, while the industry continues to debate AI’s impact on labor and training‑data boundaries. With no rollout timeline or product plan detailed in the announcement, the most concrete near‑term change is the migration of InterPositive’s team and tools into Netflix’s internal stack.