When Netflix acquired Ben Affleck’s mysterious AI company InterPositive earlier this year, it took the industry by storm.
What was the company? What tools did it create for filmmakers? How would Netflix use them, and use Affleck, who committed to work as a senior advisor to the company in the deal?
And then there was the question of price. How much was the company worth to the streaming giant? Thanks to a new securities filing, we know the answer to that final question.
Netflix disclosed Friday that it paid $587 million for InterPositive, in cash. The disclosure was made in the company’s form 10-Q, writing that “in March 2026, the Company completed an acquisition which was accounted for as a business combination for a total purchase price of approximately $587 million, consisting of cash consideration.”
While the filing does not name InterPositive, Netflix announced the deal on March 5.
InterPositive was formed in 2022 as the multi-hyphenate began to explore the AI space, with a particular emphasis on upending visual effects without impacting the creative part of filmmaking, from writing and directing to acting and production design.
“I knew I had a responsibility to my peers and our industry, to protect the power of human creativity and the people behind it. In creating InterPositive, I sought to do just that,” Affleck wrote in a post at the time. “From the invention of the moving image to the transition to digital, from motion capture to virtual production, technology has evolved alongside the artists who use it. Our shared commitment to continuing this legacy makes joining together a natural next step, in addition to Netflix’s decades of experience applying and scaling technology responsibly.”
The company captured a proprietary data set on a closed soundstage, eventually leading to the company’s first model, which Affleck wrote 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.”
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said on the company’s earnings call this week that about 300 productions currently use AI in their process, mostly in post-production.
“Gen AI is scaling quickly across the entire creative process, from concept to pre-vis through post and delivery,” Sarandos said. “We’re making higher quality output more quickly and efficiently than we could have using traditional methods. So gen AI workflows now have been used in roughly 300 of our titles with the largest concentration right to date is on post-production. But we’re leveraging gen AI for really complicated shots and sequences.”
The Netflix co-chief cited as an example the Tom Hanks-backed doc The American Experiment, which had 17 minutes of what Sarandos called “AI-enhanced” footage. “It enabled us to expand the scope of the series in ways that just wouldn’t have been feasible before. Those 17 minutes,” he added, “They were produced twice as fast and at half the cost of previous options.”
