Ben Affleck’s AI company is sold for more than $500 million
Netflix has revealed just how big it is betting on artificial intelligence, shelling out more than half a billion dollars for one of the early AI movers in Hollywood.
In March, the Los Gatos-based company announced it was acquiring Ben Affleck’s AI film tech company, InterPositive. A new securities filing shows that the streaming giant paid $587 million for the “Good Will Hunting” actor’s company. The disclosure was made last week in a Netflix filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
InterPositive was founded in 2022, when Affleck began to worry about how AI could affect the film industry.
The company is focused on developing “AI-powered tools built by and for filmmakers” and using new technology to “protect and expand creative choice,” according to Netflix’s news release in March. The streamer said it is “investing in creator-led innovation that keeps filmmakers at the center of the process” and that the tech will be exclusive to Netflix.
Netflix declined to comment on the disclosure about the value of its acquisition.
Last week, during the company’s earnings call, Netflix co-Chief Executive Ted Sarandos said its work with InterPositive is only beginning.
“It’s early days for InterPositive, but we’re broadly seeing that [generative AI] is starting to have an impact across hundreds of our productions,” Sarandos said.
He said that roughly 300 productions currently use AI in their process. The company uses the technology mostly in postproduction processes and uses generative AI for “really complicated shots and sequences,” Sarandos said during the call.
“We’re making higher quality output more quickly and efficiently than we could have using traditional methods,” he said.
He cited the historical documentary “The American Experiment,” on which Tom Hanks served as the executive producer, as an example.
The docuseries featured 17 minutes of “AI-enhanced” footage, according to Sarandos, that were produced “twice as fast and at half the cost of previous options.”
As part of the acquisition, Netflix said it will bring on InterPositive’s entire team and keep Affleck as a senior advisor.
The company’s investment in AI comes as Netflix is facing uncertainty.
Ever since Netflix shared its second-quarter earnings report, its stock price has plunged. On Monday, its stock fell 2% to $67.60.
Its second-quarter results renewed concerns among investors and analysts about the streamer’s future growth.
Netflix also narrowed its 2026 forecast to a range of $51 billion to $51.4 billion from $50.7 billion to $51.7 billion.
When launching InterPositive, Affleck said he wanted to keep “storytelling human.” So he partnered with a group of engineers to develop a proprietary dataset on a soundstage to build its first AI model.
He said the model is “trained to understand visual logic and editorial consistency, while preserving cinematic rules under real-world production challenges like missing shots, background replacements or incorrect lighting,” all while “keeping creative decisions in the hands of artists.”
Much of Hollywood is critical of the technology and skeptical of the larger companies in the space.
The Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the actors union of which Affleck is a member, recently negotiated a new contract with major studios, which secured new AI guardrails. The new guidelines govern how studios should use generative AI and strongly favor “human performances.”
On the opposite end, controversial AI creation Tilly Norwood was cast in her first official role this month. The bot, created by Particle 6, will star in a comedy drama called “Misaligned.”
Times staff writer Wendy Lee contributed to this report.
