Confirming an estimate reported last March, Netflix said Friday it paid $587 million to acquire Ben Affleck‘s AI firm InterPositive.
At the time of the surprise deal announcement, Bloomberg reported the streaming giant was paying around $600 million in the transaction. Netflix has not commented on the report, but mentioned the price tag Friday in an SEC filing. The latest filing was a more thorough overview of second-quarter financial results, which were initially conveyed Thursday in a shorter filing and a shareholder letter.
Affleck is the sole founder of InterPositive, which was quietly formed in 2022, and also served as its CEO. Netflix agreed to add the company’s small staff to its ranks as part of the acquisition, with Affleck in an advisory role.
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos was asked during the company’s quarterly earnings interview about InterPositive and how the cost savings the firm is able to generate from it would be used in the future. The topic of AI efficiencies is a loaded one for major studios and streamers at the moment, given the degree of sensitivity in the creative community to the way AI is disrupting production and complicating the outlook for entertainment workers.
In his remarks, Sarandos painted AI tools as a useful, money-saving aspects of production. The cost savings element had been emphasized by InterPositive itself prior to the acquisition, as Deadline has reported.
“It’s early days for InterPositive but we’re we’re broadly seeing that gen-AI is starting to have an impact across hundreds of our productions,” Sarandos said, citing visual effects and virtual production shop Eyeline and an in-house lab dedicated to animation.
“Gen AI is scaling quickly across the entertainment creation process, from concept to pre-vis through post and delivery,” he said. “We’re making higher-quality output more quickly and effectively than we would have using traditional methods. Gen AI workflows now have been used in roughly 300 of our titles, with the largest concentration to date in post-production. We’re leveraging gen AI for really complicated shots and sequences.”
Scenes with crowd shots or battles are examples of opportunities for AI, Sarandos said. “In many cases, productions would have left out those key shots because they would not have been able to afford them, they would not have been able to do them in the timeframes that they’re working on.” So those sequences are saved by the availability and access to these gen AI tools.
One recent documentary series, The American Experiment, features 17 minutes of AI-enhanced footage, Sarandos noted. Those minutes are produced “twice as fast and at half the cost of previous options,” he added.
All of that said, Sarandos reaffirmed the company’s belief that “it takes great artists to make something great, and AI is not changing that.”
As savings are realized, the exec said, those dollars “will likely be reinvested into more content on the service, which fuels higher-quality engagement. That whole revenue/profit flywheel that’s going to come from that is what we’ve been talking about from Day 1.”
