Netflix is planning to acquire or may have paid to acquire InterPositive , the AI filmmaking company founded by Ben Affleck, in a deal that is being valued at $600 million.

Netflix has not publicly disclosed the specifics, but the scale of the deal alone signals something significant, not just for the streaming giant, but for the entire film industry.

This is one of the largest AI acquisitions ever made by a major Hollywood studio, and it is happening at a moment when the entertainment industry is still wrestling with what artificial intelligence means for the future of filmmaking, employment, and creative ownership.

What InterPositive Actually Does

InterPositive is not the kind of AI tool that generates films from a text prompt or fabricates actors from scratch.

Affleck built it with a deliberate constraint and that constraint is important. The software can only be trained on footage that a director has already shot.

That means no footage, no function. It cannot train on existing films without permission, and it cannot generate entirely new projects without a base film to work from.

What it can do within those boundaries is genuinely powerful.

It allows filmmakers to remove unwanted objects from scenes, adjust backgrounds, and alter existing footage with a precision that would otherwise require expensive reshoots or lengthy post-production work.

David Fincher has already used the tools on an upcoming film starring Brad Pitt, a detail that speaks to the calibre of filmmakers who have taken it seriously.

Affleck started the company in secret, backed by investment firm RedBird Capital Partners.

After spending years developing the technology quietly, he began soliciting investment in 2025, meeting with venture capital firms and holding conversations with Hollywood companies about licensing it.

Netflix definitely saw something different, not a vendor relationship but an in-house capability worth owning outright.

Why Netflix Is Planning To Acquire The AI

Netflix's acquisition strategy has historically been conservative. The company has long maintained that it prefers to build rather than buy, steering clear of the costly merger deals that have defined other media consolidations.

Its recent unsuccessful $72 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery briefly suggested a shift in that philosophy.

This deal, by contrast, fits more comfortably into Netflix's original logic, buying a startup to accelerate capabilities it intends to build internally rather than acquiring an entire legacy media empire.

The goal is pretty simple to decode and that is to use AI to reduce production costs and improve the quality of content at scale.

Amazon is pursuing the same objective through an in-house AI team deployed across its film and TV operations.

Disney has struck a commercial partnership with OpenAI. The race to embed artificial intelligence into the filmmaking pipeline is no longer a distant conversation, or a fairytale wish.

It is the current reality, and Netflix has just made one of its most concrete moves within it.

The Conversation Hollywood Cannot Avoid

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Hollywood workers, writers, directors, visual effects artists, editors, have watched the AI conversation accelerate with a mixture of anxiety and anger.

The fear is not just abstract. Studios have already demonstrated a willingness to use AI to cut costs, and the history of technological disruption in entertainment is not exactly a story of workers being protected through transitions.

InterPositive's design philosophy, requiring filmmaker-shot footage, prohibiting training on unlicensed material, is a deliberate attempt to position the tool as a collaborator rather than a replacement.

Affleck has framed it in the language of cinematic history, describing filmmaking as "one long technological progression" and InterPositive as another step in that evolution.

That framing is reasonable. Sound replaced silence. Colour replaced black and white. Digital replaced film. Each transition produced anxiety and, eventually, adaptation.

But each transition also eliminated certain roles permanently, and the people whose livelihoods depended on those roles did not always land softly on the other side.

The question is not whether AI will change filmmaking. It is already changing it.

The question is who controls the tools, who profits from them, who is consulted in their development, and what protections exist for the workers caught in the middle of the shift.

If the deal goes through, it would be one of Netflix’s acquisitions and will own one of the most sophisticated AI filmmaking tools in existence.

What it does with that ownership and how transparently it does it, will say more about the future of Hollywood than the price tag ever could.