Oscar winner Ben Affleck said in a closed-door meeting that public video models address physical literacy, while commercial barriers are thawing open-source weights, and then using the crew's own live-action master footage to train the final layer of the film. Netflix has cash-acquired his post-production AI company InterPositive, founded in 2022, for approximately $587 million, as disclosed in SEC filings.

The acquisition brings in 16 engineers, researchers, and creative personnel, with Affleck serving as a senior advisor. He stated that public model footage cannot enter the film industry: camera movements lack breath, lighting lacks dramatic tension, and multi-camera setups are incoherent. Moreover, models trained on peer or unauthorized materials cannot pass Hollywood legal reviews.

The approach he described does not involve pre-training from scratch. Open-source weights have already learned color, gravity, and basic three-dimensional motion from a large amount of video. InterPositive thaws the weights and continues training from the last stopped step, focusing computational power on the final film layer. For this layer, the company self-funds and has filmed approximately 8 months of private data in a controlled studio, aligning with professional cameras, lighting, color temperature, and grain, without using web-scraped videos.

The workflow involves shooting and training simultaneously. Each new film fine-tunes a dedicated model using footage processed on the same day, with confidential materials not uploaded to third-party large model companies. Data remains with the crew, and iterative results belong to the creators currently filming the project. Upon completion, they receive the finished film and a private model that has learned the visual style of the film. The tools focus on missing shots, changing backgrounds, incorrect lighting, wire removal, re-lighting, and reconstructing images, rather than text prompts.

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos stated in the Q2 earnings call that generative AI has begun to impact hundreds of productions, with about 300 works using some form of generative tool this year. The model from InterPositive is required to work with Netflix's in-house visual effects department Eyeline and third-party tools. The $587 million divided by 16 people amounts to approximately $36.7 million per person in cash consideration, which is the arithmetic of the acquisition, not a valuation per person.

This is an acquisition of content assets, not a subscription to model interfaces. The buyer is Netflix, and the sellers are Affleck and the investors of InterPositive, with cash consideration of approximately $587 million. The money buys private stage data, post-production processes, and a team of 16 people, not the usage volume of public video models. The beneficiaries are the crews that keep daily sample footage on set and the streaming services that need to reduce visual effects costs; the ones under pressure are those relying on web-sourced materials and charging for single generative outputs.

Source: Public information