Netflix is getting into the AI business with Ben Affleck.
This isn’t an output deal, it’s a business deal, with the streaming giant set to acquire an AI-powered filmmaking technology company that Affleck quietly founded a few years ago: InterPositive.
Affleck will join Netflix as a senior adviser in the deal, alongside all of InterPositive’s staff. The company declined to comment on the terms of the acquisition.
“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 Netflix post Thursday. “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.”
InterPositive traces its origin story 2022, when Affleck decided that he wanted to explore the technology space.
Working with engineers, researchers and creative executives, he founded the company, which developed proprietary AI-powered tools meant to help filmmakers create their films and shows in a fast, efficient way, while centering the humanity of it all.
The company captured a proprietary dataset on a closed soundstage, eventually leading to the company’s first model, which Affleck writes is “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.”
In other words, the focus is on filmmaking technique, not the performance of the actors. The tool also allows directors or filmmakers to upload dailies to hone the model for a specific project.
Still, anything that touches on AI has become something of a third rail for Hollywood. That may be why Netflix also released a video discussion Thursday, featuring Affleck, Netflix chief product and technology officer Elizabeth Stone, and chief content officer Bela Bajaria discussing what role the tech may play in the creative process, and what InterPositive and Netflix do differently than the AI giants threatening to swallow the rest of the economy.
Watch:
“Our relationship with artists has always been grounded in trust: supporting the full range of their creativity and ensuring they have the power to decide how their films and shows are made,” Bajaria said in a statement. “We believe new tools should expand creative freedom, not constrain it or replace the work of writers, directors, actors, and crews. Ben and his team at InterPositive are part of a long tradition in our industry of artists leading the way in how innovation is used in storytelling. Their work is about giving filmmakers more choices, more control and more protection for their vision. We’re excited to build on that legacy together, with creators and their artistic intentions at the center of everything we do.”
“Our approach to AI has always been focused on meaningfully serving the needs of the creative community and our members,” Stone added. “The InterPositive team is joining Netflix because of our shared belief that innovation should empower storytellers, not replace them. InterPositive’s impressive technology is purpose-built for filmmakers and showrunners to work with tools that naturally support their creative visions and how they want to bring them to life. We’re excited to welcome the InterPositive team to Netflix and continue building towards a future of entertainment where technology plays a part in how stories are made, but people — and their ideas, craft and judgment — remain at the core of great storytelling.”
Affleck, of course, has a long relationship with Netflix. Just last week his production venture Artists Equity inked a streaming first-look deal with the company, and his next directorial feature, Animals, starring Affleck, Kerry Washington and Gillian Anderson, will be released on Netflix later this year.
But the InterPositive deal puts Affleck in business with a major Hollywood player in an entirely new way, perhaps even as an evangelist for the technology. The actor and director has been expressing his thoughts on the tech for years, both dismissive of its ability to completely disintermediate all of entertainment, while also being hopeful about how it can enable filmmakers like himself to achieve their goals faster.
“What AI is going to do is going to disintermediate the more laborious, less creative and more costly aspects of filmmaking that will allow costs to be brought down, that will lower the barrier to entry, that will allow more voices to be heard, that will make it easier for the people who want to make Good Will Huntings to go out and make it,” Affleck told a CNBC conference in 2024.
The InterPositive deal is also a rare acquisition for Netflix, which (putting aside the last couple of months), which has historically built internally rather than acquire outside firms. The company’s last deal (again, forget Warner Bros.) was Ready Player Me, an avatar creation platform, which it bought in December.
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