Netflix has revealed the price tag for its mysterious acquisition of Ben Affleck's AI company, InterPositive: $587 million in cash. The figure surfaced in a recent SEC filing, confirming the streaming giant paid the full amount up front for the startup, which the actor founded in 2022 to explore how artificial intelligence could transform filmmaking without replacing human creativity.

The disclosure, buried in Netflix's quarterly 10-Q filing, doesn't name InterPositive directly, but the deal was publicly announced in March. Affleck, who joined Netflix as a senior advisor, described the company's mission as protecting "the power of human creativity" while using AI to solve real-world production problems like missing shots, background replacements, and lighting errors. The startup built its first model by capturing a proprietary dataset on a closed soundstage, training it to understand visual logic and editorial consistency.

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos offered more detail this week, revealing that roughly 300 productions now use generative AI in their workflows, primarily in post-production. He cited the Tom Hanks-backed documentary "The American Experiment" as a case study: 17 minutes of footage were AI-enhanced, produced twice as fast and at half the cost of traditional methods. "We're making higher quality output more quickly and efficiently," Sarandos said, adding that AI is scaling from concept and pre-visualization through final delivery.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter