Netflix acquired InterPositive, a film post-production AI company co-founded by Ben Affleck, in March 2026 for $587 million in cash upfront, with Bloomberg reporting the total deal value could reach up to $600 million depending on performance targets. The entire InterPositive team joined Netflix, with Affleck serving as a senior adviser, and Netflix folded the company into its Eyeline Studios division.
Affleck founded InterPositive in 2022 after seeing early text-to-image demos at OpenAI, which he said led him to call Matt Damon with the message that they needed to shoot as many movies as possible because they were finished. He identified that AI researchers were technically capable but, in his words, "almost blank on how a shot is captured, lit, and cut," and built his business on that gap. When AI researchers told him their models would generalize to filmmaking from scraped data, he disagreed and rejected offers from AI companies to build the model for him. Instead, InterPositive shot its own proprietary dataset over eight months on a controlled stage, then fine-tuned open video models by unfreezing weights and training only the last cinematic layer to meet production standards. Each new film then trains a private model on its own dailies, so productions retain both the footage and the resulting model. The company operated in stealth under the entity Fin Bone LLC and grew to 16 people.
In February 2026, a month before the acquisition was announced, Affleck said publicly that AI "is not progressing in exactly the same way they sort of presented" and called it "just a tool, just like VFX" that "is not gonna be able to write anything meaningful".
InterPositive's tools assist with post-production tasks including continuity fixes, lighting adjustments, wire removal, and background enhancement while preserving creative intent; the company does not generate new content or use footage without permission. The US Patent Office granted InterPositive a patent in December 2025 for a method of training AI captioner models to analyze and recognize cinematic elements in video, with Affleck listed as inventor. Director David Fincher used InterPositive's product on a film starring Brad Pitt before the acquisition. Before the deal, InterPositive had envisioned a licensing model charging partners a fraction of cost savings generated; post-acquisition, the tools are used exclusively on Netflix in-house productions.