Netflix finally put a number on what it paid for Ben Affleck’s artificial intelligence filmmaking company, and it’s a bigger check than most outside estimates had guessed.
“We believe it takes great artists to make something great, and AI is not changing that,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told analysts on the company’s second-quarter earnings call.
In a regulatory filing disclosed Friday, Netflix confirmed it paid $587 million in cash back in March 2026 to acquire InterPositive, the AI startup Affleck founded to bring machine learning into the editing room without pushing filmmakers out of it. The streamer had announced the purchase in March without disclosing terms, though a Bloomberg report at the time pegged the price as high as $600 million.
Affleck built InterPositive quietly, running it in stealth mode for years before Netflix came calling. When the deal was first announced, he said he started the company to “protect the power of human creativity” in an industry increasingly tempted to let algorithms do the imagining for it.
His tools work in a narrower lane than the text-to-video generators that have unsettled much of Hollywood.
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“It’s not text to video prompts, but rather tools that fit into real production workflows and respect the artistic intent that’s behind the story,” Netflix Chief Technology and Product Officer Elizabeth Stone told TheWrap.
InterPositive’s model trains only on the dailies from a single movie or show, Stone said, which keeps it tethered to that specific production instead of scraping outside footage. Directors can use it to patch missing shots, replace or enhance backgrounds, correct lighting or reframe scenes that didn’t quite come together on set. Affleck now serves as a senior advisor to Netflix, and his entire InterPositive team of engineers, researchers, and producers has joined the company.
Sarandos made the financial case plain on the earnings call, noting that roughly 300 Netflix titles have already used generative AI in some form this year, most of it in post-production. He pointed to complicated sequences, like crowd shots and historic battle scenes, that productions once simply cut for budget reasons.
“Those sequences are saved by the availability and access to these GenAI tools,” he said, adding that whatever money the studio saves will likely get “reinvested into more content on the service.”
Movieguide® has kept a close eye on Netflix’s growing appetite for generative AI, from the streamer’s published rules governing AI content to Sarandos’ earlier comments that the technology gives creators better tools. The InterPositive purchase, coming not long after Affleck’s own Netflix release THE RIP, puts a filmmaker with real standing behind the argument that AI can serve a story rather than replace the person telling it.
That’s a distinction worth watching for families sorting through what shows up on screen. A tool that helps a director finish the movie she set out to make is a different thing entirely than one that writes the movie for her, and the difference will only get harder to spot as more of these tools quietly move from stealth mode into everyday production.
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