Can Ben Affleck Lead Hollywood’s Embrace of AI? | Analysis

For many in the entertainment industry, artificial intelligence is a boogeyman poised to steal the soul of Hollywood. But Netflix and Ben Affleck have seemingly found a way to embrace the technology without freaking everyone out.  

Netflix on Thursday acquired Affleck’s InterPositive, which said it provides AI tools for video post-production, for an undisclosed sum. The startup said it built its own model using footage it shot itself, training the algorithm to think like a filmmaker or editor. Other creatives can then feed dailies into the model, creating a “mini-model” that’s optimized specifically for that film or show. It specializes in post-production fixes like adding missing shots, correcting lighting or enhancing backgrounds. 

One thing it doesn’t do, as Netflix was keen to point out, was to generate whole scenes or even actors through a simple written prompt, the kind of nightmare scenario we’ve seen play out with scary-real video AI models like ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0. 

“It’s not text-to-video prompts, but rather tools that fit into real production workflows and respect the artistic intent that’s behind the story,” Netflix chief technology and product officer Elizabeth Stone told TheWrap.

On paper, InterPositive’s approach represents a potential path forward with AI at a time when there remains a lot of fear and mistrust around the technology. While studios are keen to take advantage of AI’s potential to reduce costs by eliminating more mundane tasks, they face resistance from a creative community already battered from years of industry consolidation and jobs cuts. 

That’s why the InterPositive acquisition is a smart play by Netflix. Affleck’s credibility gives the streaming giant license to present itself as a safe space to explore AI in a way that doesn’t undermine the creative spirit. The kind of enhancements InterPositive promises to provide removes a lot of extra grunt work that represents wasted time and money.

“It’s a good move,” said Bryn Mooser, CEO of AI studio Asteria. “Affleck is a good voice of AI and he’s trusted by filmmakers.”

That is, if InterPositive can follow through with its pitch.

A very stealthy startup

The AI startup world is littered with companies that overpromise and underdeliver. It remains to be seen whether InterPositive, which has been in stealth mode before its announcement last week, has a model powerful enough to actually enable these kinds of tools. Training a proper model takes time and an enormous amount of data — just look at the billions of dollars Google and OpenAI have poured into Gemini and ChatGPT, respectively (the InterPositive model would be far narrower in scope, however).

One person who works with AI startups regularly said they had never heard of the company before Thursday’s announcement, and had canvassed many others in the AI community and had drawn a blank. Two others in the AI field said they were aware Affleck was working on something, but not the specific product. 

InterPositive’s LinkedIn page, which was created on Thursday after the Netflix announcement, features just four posts related to the acquisition — the first a Variety story about the deal. If you had searched for the company on LinkedIn earlier that day, you would’ve stumbled onto interpositive, another company based in Budapest providing AI-powered visual effects and 2D and 3D animation.

Of the few employees listed on LinkedIn, there is creative technology manager Wes Palmer, who joined in July from Eyeline — Netflix’s in-house VFX and research arm. Joe Penna, InterPositive’s chief creative technologist, is a film director who previously worked at Stability AI, known best for Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image generative AI model.

Netflix declined to make Affleck or InterPositive available for an interview. 

For Affleck, the deal represents a further strengthening of ties between the actor/director and Netflix. A week ago, Netflix signed a first look deal with Affleck and Matt Damon’s Artists Equity studio. In January, Affleck and Damon’s film “The Rip” came out to a strong start on Netflix. 

A good story to tell

For Netflix, the InterPositive story is one that Hollywood can get behind. The model was built from the perspective of a filmmaker — Affleck said in an interview that the venture came out of his early experience of seeing generative AI video and where it would “often fall apart” — rather than a tech bro. 

Ever since it raised some eyebrows after talking about the AI work used on the Argentinian film “El Eternauta,” Netflix has tread lightly on the topic, with its leaders insisting that the creative aspect to film and TV be done by humans. “We’re also pro-human,” Netflix CFO Spencer Neumann said at the Morgan Stanley investor conference on Wednesday, a reflection on the state of things when that sort of reassurance is necessary.

Critically, InterPositive said that when it trained its model, it didn’t use public assets or copy-protected material. That’s music to the entertainment industry’s ears, since it differs from the likes of Google, OpenAI or China’s Deepseek, which scrape publicly available media regardless of ownership. The company’s idea of letting filmmakers feed it dailies also means those individuals have control over how powerful and specialized a model could become.

“You’re improving your editorial process, your ability to mix color, finish your film, do visual effects,” Affleck said in a video interview released by Netflix. “It’s not a way of imposing a new set of reactions or something alien or foreign to the character. It can only understand this and only build this tool because it’s trained on the character that the actor has already built.” 

The kinds of benefits that InterPositive touts aren’t as sexy as creating fist fights between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt out of nothing by simply typing a few words, but could save money at a time when all of the media companies are looking to cut costs. Even Netflix raised some eyebrows when projected spending $20 billion on content this year, up 10% from 2025.

The kinds of tools that InterPositive are touting could be a boon to Netflix, but the question remains: Can it actually deliver?

Netflix alluded to the work that InterPositive still needs to do as it is integrated into the company’s Eyeline division.

“It’s not like it’s a fully complete and ready to go tool for every production,” Stone said. “So we still have some advancement in the technology to drive.”

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