Affleck

Netflix has acquired InterPositivethe post-production AI tools company that Ben Affleck founded in 2022 and that was quietly developing tools. Its 16 employees go to work for the platform and the actor and director takes on advisory roles. The operation occurs just a week after Netflix will abandon the bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. What InterPositive is NOT. It is worth starting with what InterPositive does not do: it does not generate movies from a prompt of text. It’s not soraor anything similar. InterPositive starts from the already shot material of a series or movie (in any production, what is known as the dailiesthe raw footage that is recorded each day) and trains a specific AI model according to the characteristics of each production. This model then allows manipulate material during post-production: correct color, relight shots, add visual effects, reframe shots or redo shots that were not filmed. The company’s first model, for example, was trained to understand what Affleck calls “visual logic and editorial consistency”, respecting the real conditions of a shoot: the model solved common problems such as missing shots, details in the backgrounds that need to be corrected, incorrect lighting… All oriented towards filming techniques, not the actors’ performances. AI yes, but with nuances. At a conference in 2024, Affleck argued that AI “will eliminate the most laborious, least creative and most expensive aspects of filmmaking,” reducing barriers to entry. His stance is born from a specific concern for preserving what he calls “judgment”: the ability to make creative decisions that are only built with decades of experience. Affleck spoke to Netflix executives from InterPositive for the first time last fall, and acknowledged initially feeling “scared” at the idea of ​​computers playing a central role in production. Netflix, in favor. The acquisition fits into a strategy that Netflix has been defining with some consistency since 2024. At that time, the Argentine ‘El Eternauta’ included the first AI-generated scene in the final footagea sequence that was completed ten times faster than it would have been possible to do it with conventional effects. In ‘Happy Gilmore 2’ they used AI to digitally rejuvenate actors, and in ‘Pedro Páramo’ as well, with a total budget equivalent to what the visual effects of ‘The Irishman’ alone cost five years earlier. That timing Well. It’s very curiousand it is not clear if it means anything, that the purchase of InterPositive is announced just a week after Netflix withdrew from the bidding for the studios and streaming from Warner Bros. Discovery. Netflix saved, in the words of its financial director, “2.8 billion dollars.” The acquisition of InterPositive, although certainly of much smaller dimensions (although nothing is known about figures), indicates where it can direct part of those resources: basically, its own production. Disney, on the other side. Meanwhile, one of Netflix’s biggest competitors, Disney, has signed a three-year license agreement with OpenAI which allows Sora users to create short videos with more than 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars. One billion dollars of investment that goes in the opposite direction to what Netflix intends, which is to make its own productions cheaper. Regardless of the position of each player in this game, Hollywood experiments more and more openly with AI in all phases of production, from pre-production to visual effects. A new landscape is opening up for film production and Affleck’s company is just one of the first chapters. In Xataka | ‘Critterz’ will be much more than the first AI-animated film: welcome to the new era of machine-made cinema