Netflix Acquires Ben Affleck’s AI Filmmaking Company for $600 Million
In one of its largest acquisitions, Netflix was reported to spend up to $600 million on InterPositive, the AI filmmaking company of Ben Affleck.
According to the Netflix deal reported by Bloomberg, the investors of Affleck and InterPositive are to get up to $600 million provided that the company will meet some performance goals, anonymous sources were quoted as saying. According to the report, the sum that Netflix paid initially as InterPositive was less than that.
On March 5, Netflix acquired InterPositive, owned by Affleck, in an unspecified amount. The entire AI filmmaking company of 16 people, engineers, researchers and creatives, will be part of Netflix after the acquisition, and Affleck will act as a senior advisor to Netflix to give guidance to the company. This came a week following the time that Netflix ditched its bid to acquire the studios and streaming operations of Warner Bros. Discovery, which chose not to present a counteroffer to Paramount Skydance on increasing its hostile bid of WBD by $1/share to an offer of winning an award of $31/share.
Neither Netflix nor Affleck disclosed the names of investors in InterPositive except that of Affleck himself. This is the case with the L.A.-based company that had been in stealth since he had established it in 2022.
Affleck describes the AI filmmaking company InterPositive system as creating an AI model using the dailies of an existing production and adding a filmmaker to the postproduction process whose sole purpose is to enable such things as mix and colour, relighting shots, and visual effects.
Netflix intends to share the access to the tech of InterPositive with its creative partners but does not intend to commercially sell it. Bela Bajaria, the Netflix chief content officer, is promoting the AI technology of InterPositive as something that would give partners more options, more control and more protection to their vision.
According to Netflix’s chief content officer, Bela Bajaria, the AI technology of InterPositive will present its partners with more options, more control and more security for their vision.
According to Elizabeth Stone, the chief product and technology officer of Netflix, when you are offering generative AI video platforms right now, they tend to work as an engineer but not as a filmmaker. She mentioned that the InterPositive tools should enable filmmakers to create better content; it is not the film or TV show faster or cheaper but better.
Stone said that the company has always been keen on meaningfully attending to the needs of the creative community and its members with regards to AI. The InterPositive team is becoming part of Netflix due to the fact that we both believe that innovative approaches should complement storytellers and not substitute them. The reason InterPositive created such a great technology is to make sure that filmmakers and showrunners can work with tools that are inherently conducive to their creative visions and how they prefer to implement them.
In a quote regarding the InterPositive deal with Netflix, Affleck wrote: I cannot imagine a better fate of this work to be in your hands, and I anticipate the time when the rest of the creative community will gain access to what we create and the future we are working towards as a team.
