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When Netflix acquired Ben Affleck’s mysterious AI company InterPositive earlier this year, it took the industry by storm.

What was the company? What tools did it create for filmmakers? How would Netflix use them, and use Affleck, who committed to work as a senior advisor to the company in the deal?

And then there was the question of price. How much was the company worth to the streaming giant? Thanks to a new securities filing, we know the answer to that final question.

Netflix disclosed in an SEC filing Friday that it paid $587 million for InterPositive, in cash. The disclosure was made in the company’s form 10-Q, writing that “in March 2026, the Company completed an acquisition which was accounted for as a business combination for a total purchase price of approximately $587 million, consisting of cash consideration.”

While the filing does not name InterPositive, Netflix announced the deal on March 5. The sale price was also filed in the company’s Q1 10-Q, which was filed in May.

InterPositive was formed in 2022 as the multi-hyphenate began to explore the AI space, with a particular emphasis on upending visual effects without impacting the creative part of filmmaking, from writing and directing to acting and production design.

“I knew I had a responsibility to my peers and our industry, to protect the power of human creativity and the people behind it. In creating InterPositive, I sought to do just that,” Affleck wrote in a post at the time. “From the invention of the moving image to the transition to digital, from motion capture to virtual production, technology has evolved alongside the artists who use it. Our shared commitment to continuing this legacy makes joining together a natural next step, in addition to Netflix’s decades of experience applying and scaling technology responsibly.”

The company captured a proprietary data set on a closed soundstage, eventually leading to the company’s first model, which Affleck wrote was “trained to understand visual logic and editorial consistency, while preserving cinematic rules under real-world production challenges such as missing shots, background replacements or incorrect lighting.”

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said on the company’s earnings call this week that about 300 productions currently use AI in their process, mostly in post-production.

“Gen AI is scaling quickly across the entire creative process, from concept to pre-vis through post and delivery,” Sarandos said. “We’re making higher quality output more quickly and efficiently than we could have using traditional methods. So gen AI workflows now have been used in roughly 300 of our titles with the largest concentration right to date is on post-production. But we’re leveraging gen AI for really complicated shots and sequences.”

The Netflix co-chief cited as an example the Tom Hanks-backed doc The American Experiment, which had 17 minutes of what Sarandos called “AI-enhanced” footage. “It enabled us to expand the scope of the series in ways that just wouldn’t have been feasible before. Those 17 minutes,” he added, “They were produced twice as fast and at half the cost of previous options.”

The great Gen Z genre land grab is in full swing.

Mere months after Obsession and Backrooms stormed the summer box office, Hollywood studios have been throwing millions at Internet-fluent horror filmmakers and online-native IP in a battle for the dollars, eyeballs and hearts (in that order) of Gen Z viewers.

The most urgent example today is Backrooms director Kane Parsons, whose $10 million film stands a A24’s top-grossing movie ever with $374 million globally. He is in the midst of a full-court press from multiple power players who want to secure the 21-year-old auteur’s future work.

As first reported by Puck, sources confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that in recent weeks, Warner Bros. bosses Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy flew to Parsons’ home in the Bay Area, where he lives with his mother, to court the filmmaker. On Thursday, he partook in a Zoom with HBO boss Casey Bloys and head of drama and HBO films Francesca Orsi, as the proposed deal with Warners would encompass film and TV.

Universal chief Donna Langley has also met with Parsons, after successfully wooing Obsession filmmaker Curry Barker for his next movie. A24, meanwhile, very much does not want to lose him, and per Puck is courting him for a Backrooms sequel as well as another original project.

It’s unclear why A24 hadn’t inked a deal with Parsons prior to the release of Backrooms, though it is known that Parsons fully owns the IP, which began life as a series of YouTube shorts.

A24 has long been known for breaking new directing talent, like Robert Eggers (The Witch), Ari Aster (Hereditary) and Celine Song (Past Lives). And while some directors, like Aster and Song, have stayed loyal to the studio, other filmmakers like Eggers and Everything Everywhere All At Once filmmakers Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert have signed deals with larger, more moneyed operations. Eggers’s home is now the Universal specialty label Focus, while the Daniels signed a pre-best picture, five-year deal with Universal.

Splashy deals for online creators have intensified this year, but kicked off in earnest in at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, when A24 beat out Universal and other studios with a seven-figure deal to land Talk to Me, the Australian horror movie from first-time feature filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou. Sources have said other studios, including Uni and Warners, attempted to court the YouTubers-turned-horror filmmakers for their follow-up film, but A24 was ultimately able to land the directors’ next film, 2025’s Bring Her Back, and put a Talk to Me sequel into development. Of course, studios would still like to work with them to this day, with Warners said to be in particular high on the duo.

Possibly in order to stave off filmmaker attrition, sources tell THR that in the past few years, A24 has asked that a first-look at a filmmaker’s second project be baked into the deal for their first. This appears not to have been the case with Parsons and Backrooms.

The feeding frenzy for Parsons follows the similar hunt to land Obsession director Barker’s next original project. His Obsession follow-up Anything But Ghosts is already shot and is at Focus, with the studio landing that project after acquiring Obsession out of last year’s Toronto Film Festival. But, in the middle of Obsession’s epic, $400 million box office run, a rival studio offered Barker an astounding $10 million deal for his next original project, sight unseen. Ultimately, Barker stayed in the Universal family for his third film, with the project landing at Universal Film Group and Blumhouse Atomic Monster in what was described as a rich eight-figure deal.

Parsons and Barker are not the only directors cashing in. There have been a myriad of creatives drafting off studios’ fervor for Gen Z-tinged horror talent.

Earlier this month, Warner Bros won a five-studio bidding war with a multi-million-dollar deal for the underlying rights to Siren Head, a viral horror meme that is behind billions of views across TikTok, YouTube and Roblox. Weapons filmmaker Zach Cregger is attached to write and produce the project, along with Whalefall‘s Brian Duffield, who could direct. Amazon MGM ended up the victor in a massive bidding war for the film rights to the YouTube-released horror franchise The Mandela Catalogue from Alex Kister, who will direct for producers United Artists and Amblin.

If these numbers seem wild, there’s a real long-term business reasoning behind them. In success, landing a creator early could mean hundreds of millions in profits (or even north of $1 billion) for a company over a person’s career. Think what Christopher Nolan’s decades at Warner Bros. have netted the company, or the absurd amount of money South Park creators Trey Stone and Matt Parker have generated for Paramount. Of course, few people will ever reach those heights, but these riches are in part driving the early bets studios are taking.

—Tony Maglio contributed to this story.

Natalie Portman famously saw a twisted version of herself in mirrors as part of her Oscar-winning performance as a tortured ballerina in Black Swan.

She may experience the same queasy sensation if Unherd writer Valerie Stivers is to be believed, as she suggests in a July 17 column that Cusk’s upcoming novel, Life of M, is a thinly-veiled portrait of Portman.

And Portman, despite apparently being friends with Cusk and a cheerleader for her novels, may not be flattered with what she sees in the literary mirror. “Chatter in New York literary circles says that Cusk’s upcoming novel, Life of M, is based on Cusk’s relationship with Portman,” Stivers reveals in her Unherd column, entitled A Novelist’s Dark Portrait of Natalie Portman — Rachel Cusk’s New Book Mines the Actress’s Life.

The novel, set for an Aug. 25, 2026 release and available for pre-order, centers on a famous actress, M, and a writer tapped to chronicle her life amid the glamor of olive groves, beaches and from behind the tinted windows of limousines.

“The movie star M is one of the most recognizable faces of our time. Her image is everywhere. It has been like that since she was a child. With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rearranged. M may live in the same places as real people. She may meet her friends or collect her children from school or walk her dogs as they do. But it seems the rules of reality have melted away,” a synopsis from Macmillan Publishers, which is releasing Cusk’s next novel in the U.S. market, states on its website.

“Now, a writer has decided to pay close attention to M’s life in the hope of understanding who she really is. It is hard not to feel ugly next to M, hard not to feel insignificant. But what truths ― about the very experience of living ― might this proximity allow the writer to briefly capture?,” the synopsis continues.

Stivers, who like Portman lives in Paris, after apparently getting a peek at a pre-publication copy, hints in her column “a Cusk book about you is never going to be flattering,” and that the Hollywood actress has concluded as much.

“M’s key biographical information is very similar to Portman’s. The actress’ dissatisfaction and betrayal at the finished product, as recorded in the final pages of the book, is also said to be true to life,” Stivers writes.

Portman is certainly a fan of Cusk’s novels. In a March 2021 Elle magazine column where Portman, herself a best-selling author, was asked to recommend other books, she cited Cusk. On which books surprised Portman, she answered: “That you can know much about a protagonist through the people around them: The Outline Trilogy (Outline, Transit, and Kudos) by Rachel Cusk.”

The Hollywood Reporter reached out to representatives for Portman for comment.