When Netflix acquired Ben Affleck’s mysterious AI company InterPositive earlier this year, it revolutionized the industry.
What was the company? What tools have you created for filmmakers? How will Netflix use it, and how will it use Affleck, who has committed to serving as a senior advisor to the company in the deal?
Then there was the issue of price. How much was the company worth to the streaming giant? Thanks to the introduction of new securities, we know the answer to this last question.
Netflix revealed in an SEC filing on Friday that it paid $587 million in cash for InterPositive. The disclosure was made in the company’s Form 10-Q, writing that “in March 2026, the Company completed an acquisition that was deemed to be a business combination for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $587 million, consisting of cash consideration.”
While the filing didn’t mention InterPositive’s name, Netflix announced the deal on March 5. The selling price was also presented in the company’s first-quarter 10-Q, which was filed in May.
InterPositive was created in 2022 when the multi-hyphenate company began exploring the field of artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on improving 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 colleagues 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 motion picture to the transition to digital, from motion capture to virtual production, technology has evolved along with the artists who use it. Our shared commitment to continuing this legacy makes joining together a natural next step, coupled with Netflix’s decades of experience applying and scaling technology responsibly.”
The company captured a proprietary dataset on an enclosed sound stage, ultimately leading to the company’s first model, which Affleck wrote was “trained to understand visual logic and editorial consistency, while maintaining cinematic rules under real-world production challenges like missing shots, background replacement, or incorrect lighting.”
About 300 productions currently use AI in their operations, most of them in post-production, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said on the company’s earnings call this week.
“The new generation of AI is rapidly expanding across the entire creative process, from concept to pre-concept and delivery,” Sarandos said. “We’re producing high-quality output more quickly and efficiently than we could have using traditional methods. So, AGI workflows have now been used in nearly 300 of our titles with the biggest focus to date on post-production. But we’re leveraging AGI to get really complex shots and sequences.”
The Netflix co-president cited as an example the document backed by Tom Hanks The American experiencewhich was 17 minutes long of what Sarandos called “AI-enhanced” footage. “It has enabled us to expand the scope of the series in ways that were not possible before,” he added. “Those 17 minutes were produced twice as quickly and at half the cost of previous options.”
