Netflix bought InterPositive, the startup Ben Affleck founded, in 2026 for about $587 million in cash and folded the team into the company. Speaking at Bloomberg’s Screentime event, Affleck said he isn’t worried about “Skynet,” and he doesn’t think the new wave of production tools is going to take over Hollywood in any real sense.
The context matters. Affleck started InterPositive in 2022, and by the time Netflix acquired it in 2026, the company had fewer than 20 employees. He’s argued that film and TV are among the least likely industries to be disintermediated. In his view, this is another form of computing, and he repeated the line he used in 2024: it can imitate, but it can’t write Shakespeare for you.
For Affleck, the real value is in speeding up repetitive work. Studios are already using these tools for library analysis, pre-visualization, dialogue editing, color correction, visual effects, and post-production. His bigger concern is education. He pointed to learned helplessness and to a 30% rise in college A grades over three years.
InterPositive built project-specific tools for lighting correction, shot reframing, and continuity fixes, trained on a production’s dailies. If you follow this corner of the business, that stands out, especially with the market projected to grow from $24.04 billion in 2025 to $194.08 billion by 2034, while fights over jobs, copyright, and creative protections linked to the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes keep getting sharper.
Author: Emmanuel Pina
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