Ben Affleck’s $587 Million Bet on the Future of Hollywood

There’s a moment in Ben Affleck’s new Netflix thriller, Animals, when a young boy hurtles down a steep concrete embankment beside the Los Angeles River in a tiny wagon.

As he flies toward Affleck, something strange happens. The boy appears to spring out of the wagon like a clown fired from a circus cannon, and Affleck catches him.

The physics seem to belong more to a cartoon than a Hollywood thriller.

Was it AI? It certainly looks like something that might have been created or altered with artificial intelligence. But we don’t know. An odd-looking effect isn’t proof that a shot was AI-generated.

Affleck has acknowledged using AI for “lots of things” on the film, without identifying precisely which shots or tasks involved the technology.

What’s more interesting is what happens when you stop looking for the AI.

Much of Animals looks like the expensive, polished Hollywood production it is. And audiences are watching: the thriller reached the top of Netflix’s worldwide daily film ranking on October 10.

For Hollywood, though, the film may represent something more important than another streaming hit. It offers a glimpse of how movies might be made.

In March, Netflix acquired InterPositive, the AI filmmaking company Affleck founded in 2022. The cash price, subsequently disclosed as approximately $587 million, is an astonishing vote of confidence in the technology.

InterPositive is not primarily a machine for generating entire feature films from text prompts. Its tools are designed to work with footage filmmakers have already shot: changing lighting, modifying backgrounds, cleaning up unwanted details and solving problems that might otherwise demand costly visual-effects work or reshoots.

Imagine reaching the editing room and discovering the lighting is wrong in an important scene, or a distracting object is visible behind an actor. Those fixes once meant extra time, extra money, and sometimes another trip to the set.

AI increasingly offers another option.

In an interview with TheWrap, Affleck described using material from Animals to train InterPositive’s tools. He framed the technology as a way to support filmmakers and their crews rather than replace them.

It is a distinction that matters. And one that many people in Hollywood aren’t buying.

On X, Cinema Tweets, an account that has long championed Affleck, responded with genuine anger. The writer said he had once called Affleck his generation’s Warren Beatty. Now he felt betrayed.

His question was blunt: was the technology putting working-class industry people out of jobs?

It’s a legitimate concern. Films employ electricians, grips, camera operators, set designers, editors, visual-effects artists, sound technicians and scores of other specialists whose contributions seldom make headlines.

But sit through the credits of Animals. The names keep coming.

For all the speculation about machines replacing humans, a Hollywood film like this still depends on a large team of people. Affleck has not replaced the film industry with a computer.

Of course, long credits don’t prove nobody lost work. An AI-assisted film can still employ hundreds while reducing the hours required in certain departments. That leads to the more interesting question: what happens when the same people can make a movie in less time, for less money?

Suppose AI allows a filmmaker to complete in three days work that once consumed three weeks of postproduction. Does the studio eliminate positions? Possibly.

But greater productivity could also allow it to commission more movies, attempt more ambitious visual storytelling or give emerging filmmakers a chance to work with budgets that previously would have been prohibitive.

Neither outcome is inevitable. What matters is how the gains are distributed.

There’s another wrinkle in Affleck’s story. He and Matt Damon founded Artists Equity, a production company that has promoted sharing a film’s financial upside with creative collaborators and crews. That doesn’t settle the employment question, but it complicates the picture of a filmmaker indifferent to the people behind the camera.

In principle, cheaper production and broader participation in its rewards could reinforce each other. Whether they do will depend on choices made by studios, production companies and filmmakers—not by the software alone.

Sound, colour, digital cameras and computer-generated imagery each changed filmmaking. They transformed jobs and business models as well as what audiences could see on screen.

AI will do the same. But this technology may also put increasingly sophisticated filmmaking within the reach of people who have never had a studio’s resources.

Think of an independent filmmaker in Vancouver, Lagos or Mumbai with a compelling story but no access to a multimillion-dollar budget. What if AI-assisted tools could help that filmmaker achieve effects and production values that once belonged exclusively to Hollywood?

Or a documentarian who could reconstruct a historical location without building a physical set? Or a small production company suddenly able to attempt a film it could never have financed?

Those are possibilities, not guarantees. The danger is that the big studios pocket the savings while workers absorb the disruption. The opportunity is more stories, more voices and more people able to create.

Which brings us back to Affleck. He has made a major film using AI and sold his AI filmmaking company to Netflix for $587 million.

Will AI put Hollywood out of business? Not for a while. Will it make movies faster and cheaper to produce? Almost certainly.

The real question is whether Hollywood makes the same number of films with fewer people—or more films, telling more ambitious stories, and opening the industry to a new generation of filmmakers.

That’s a much more interesting question than whether a boy flying out of a wagon was created with AI.

With thanks to Cinema Tweets for prompting a debate worth having. Promotional poster courtesy of Netflix; artwork credited to Empire Design.