Ben Affleck’s AI tech company, InterPositive, was recently acquired by Netflix – and the deal was worth $600m according to a new report. Ben Affleck: movie star, director, and now tech business tycoon. Last week, it was announced that Netflix had acquired InterPositive, an AI filmmaking software company that Affleck initially founded in 2022. According ... Netflix reportedly paying $600m for Ben Affleck’s AI software company
Ben Affleck’s AI tech company, InterPositive, was recently acquired by Netflix – and the deal was worth $600m according to a new report.
Ben Affleck: movie star, director, and now tech business tycoon. Last week, it was announced that Netflix had acquired InterPositive, an AI filmmaking software company that Affleck initially founded in 2022.
According to a new report by Bloomberg (via Variety), the deal for InterPositive could be worth up to $600m – said to be a record high for Netflix. There are caveats here, though: Affleck’s software has to meet “certain performance targets” to hit that sum, and it’s said that Netflix’s initial cheque was considerably lower.
So what on earth is CompuGlobal-Hyper-Mega-Net – sorry, InterPositive?
According to what we’ve been able to glean, it’s a piece of post-production software capable of analysing existing footage and providing recommendations for lighting, colour grading and VFX. Or at least, we think that’s what it does.
Last year, the company filed a patent for a “model to generate captions for video content by analysing and recognising cinematic elements.”
When the deal was announced last week, Affleck insisted that his software isn’t the ‘magic footage from text prompts’ type of AI, and said that it “keeps filmmakers at the center of the process.”
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“It’s not about text-prompting or generating something from nothing,” Affleck said in a video made by Netflix. “AI, people mostly think of it as making something from nothing: ‘I’m gonna type something into a computer and it’s gonna give me a movie.’ That’s not what this is.”
In a further statement published on Netflix’s site, Affleck explained:
“I began filming a proprietary dataset on a controlled soundstage with all the familiarities of a full production. I wanted to build a workflow that captures what happens on a set, with vocabulary that matched the language cinematographers and directors already spoke and included the kind of consistency and controls they would expect.
“Intensive research and development led to our first model, 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. We also built in restraints to protect creative intent, so the tools are designed for responsible exploration while keeping creative decisions in the hands of artists — and ensuring that the benefits of this technology flow directly back to the story they’re trying to tell.”
It’s early in the morning, so this writer’s still wrapping his head around how, exactly, the tech works. Netflix, which is first and foremost a tech company, clearly sees the value of it, though. We’ll wait to see whether it does indeed make filmmakers’ lives easier.
