People talking up the supposed merits of artificial intelligence are usually pretty quick to get to the cost-cutting benefits of not actually having to pay human artists to make things; certainly, that was a tack Netflix took this week, when it used its latest earnings call to brag about all the cash it’s been saving by using generative AI on more than 300 projects to date. All of which makes it kind of wild to hear just how much the streamer has spent on at least some of these tools—and specifically on Ben Affleck’s firm InterPositive, which Netflix has just revealed it spent $587 million to acquire earlier this year.
We’ve been trying to wrap our head around that number for a few minutes now, trying to come up with a pithy metaphor to describe just what a gigantic stack of cash it is. But, owing to the fact that it’s more money than we and everyone we know will ever see in our entire lives, the only decent comparison we can whip up is that $587 million is enough to buy 587 million things that cost a dollar, or 587 things that cost a million dollars—either amount being enough to completely bake our brains.
Now, to be fair, Netflix didn’t just get the InterPositive tools, which tend to get described in somewhat nebulous terms, but which can supposedly crap out footage and shots using a model that’s been trained on proprietary material to “understand” things like camera angles, directorial flow, and lighting: They also got Affleck to hang around and serve as a “senior advisor” on how all this stuff should be used; it’s not clear how often the streamer took the The Rip star up on his offer, but we figure being able to tell folks Ben Affleck is advising you in a senior fashion has gotta be worth a few million all on its, own right? So that’s just another $580 million or so to go.
Netflix had hinted around at how much it had dropped on the toolset back when the sale went down back in March, but THR managed to dig the actual number out of an SEC filing Netflix made on Friday. (Sure, it’s possible the $587 million cast payment listed as “an acquisition” in the filing might have been for something else, but the timing lines up extremely closely.) So, yeah: The next time Ted Sarandos and his team start crowing about how much money they’re saving by not paying visual effects artists to work on their movie, remember that number: $587 million. That’s what cutting costs looks like!
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