Category: Entertainment

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.

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos acknowledged that second seasons of the streamer’s shows tend to draw less well than debut seasons. But, he said, it’s not as bad as a recently prevalent narrative would make it seem.

The streamer also touted some early results from the addition of video podcasts to the platform in its quarterly earnings report — but declined to divulge any specific numbers in a large-scale data release for the first half of the year.

The season two problem narrative was sparked by a recent Bloomberg story detailing steep viewing declines for several shows in their second seasons, among them Beef, The Four Seasons and One Piece. Sarandos didn’t dispute those findings — which came from Netflix’s own publicly released weekly top 10 lists — but said that “in aggregate, we’re not seeing any material change in our second season viewing compared to season ones. Our second seasons are performing well within our bands of expectation.”

Sarandos also said that viewing declines for the second season of a show are “very common” across the industry and offered this rationale for why it happens at Netflix: “It’s even moreso with us, because we launch our shows so big,” he said. “Our global reach, our discovery mechanism, releasing all at once — this enables us to find a very large audience early. Our shows tend to start really big, where most other places, their shows start pretty small and occasionally grow from there.”

Sarandos added, “When we look across the entire portfolio … our season two fall-off has actually slightly improved this year relative to last year.”

As for video podcasts, Netflix made a push into that area this year, adding shows from The Ringer, Jay Shetty, Pete Davidson, Brian Williams and New York’s Breakfast Club radio show, among others. Sarandos noted that the shows overindex with mobile users relative to long-form series and have driven up engagement a bit during daytime hours.

So how are they doing, specifically? Well …

A note at the end of Netflix’s data release said that all video podcasts (there are several dozen) are lumped into an “other shows” grouping that also includes any series that received fewer than 50,000 views (calculated as viewing hours divided by run time) in the first half of the year. That doesn’t necessarily mean that every podcast fell below that threshold, the company says. But since it’s a relatively new type of programming for the platform, Netflix opted not to break out the stats for any single show.

The “other shows” category accounted for 757 million viewing hours from January to June — which sounds like a lot but is only about one percent of the 74.4 billion hours Netflix users spent watching all series in those six months.

The Walt Disney Co. is protective of its iconic characters and intellectual property. The National Football League is too. The league wants its teams showcased in the best light, and Disney wants its characters to shine.

On Thursday afternoon, in New York’s Jacob Javits Center, the world of Disney collided with the world of the NFL, all in service of an unusual new consumer product line, one that mixes some of Disney’s characters with all 32 NFL teams.

That’s how Darth Vader, flanked by a pair of Storm Troopers, found himself on stage at Fanatics Fest alongside NFL legend and Las Vegas Raiders owner Tom Brady, Raiders quarterback Fernando Mendoza and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, with Marvel chairman Kevin Feige looking on from the audience.

Vader was the first pick in the “Disney Fan Draft,” held on the floor of the convention, which served as a launchpad for the “Disney | Champion NFL Collection,” which pairs Disney characters with an NFL team.

The apparel line launched at the Fest with eight teams (and characters), with all 32 launching in August.

In addition to Vader and the Raiders, the collection includes the Buffalo Bills and Beast from Beauty and the Beast; the Dallas Cowboys and Toy Story’s Woody; the New England Patriots and Marvel’s Captain America; the New York Giants and Wreck-It Ralph; the New York Jets and Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear; the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Captain Hook; and the Washington Commanders and Toy Story’s Hamm.

“The Disney | Champion NFL Collection reflects our continued commitment to creating consumer products and experiences that sit at the intersection of culture, fandom, and storytelling,” Paul Gitter, executive VP global brand commercialization for Disney Consumer Products, tells The Hollywood Reporter. “As we build toward ESPN’s ‘Year of the Super Bowl,’ we’re expanding how fans engage with Disney across sports through moments that drive relevance, connection and long-term brand affinity.”

According to Bret Healey, director of graphic design at Disney Consumer Products, the Disney products team really did draft the characters for each team. While what happened on stage at Fanatics Fest was in service of the show, the Disney team put a lot of thought into each pairing.

“We did the draft based on the team first: What’s the team’s personality? What are their colors? What’s their team name? What are their fans like? What’s their city like? What are their ‘like ‘if you know you know’ moments? So I took that all into consideration with my team, and we essentially drafted all 32 of the teams together,” Healey says.

And while many of the characters are Disney “all-stars,” so to speak, he says that they were deliberate in their choices.

“Whichever character worked best for that team, that’s the story we were going to tell, even if they are a tertiary character,” he says.

Consumer products are one of the core parts of Disney’s corporate flywheel. The business generated revenue of $974 million in the company’s latest quarterly report, with operating income of $479 million, enormous margins that reflect Disney’s heavy focus on licensing through partners like Champion.

With its latest effort, the company is banking that it can bring some NFL fans along for the ride too.

After more than 10 years of streaming content to the country, Netflix has kicked off production on its first original series ever commissioned in New Zealand. On Friday, the company unveiled Queenstown, an eight-episode drama set amid the luxury ski scene of the titular South Island resort town.

Unfolding amid the moneyed gloss of the town’s ski-resort elite, the series follows a privileged family and the people who work for them as their lives collide over power, loyalty and desire — or, as Netflix put it, “a wealthy family at war with itself.” Production is underway on location in Queenstown itself.

Queenstown was created and written by Chloe Stearns (Wolf Like Me, The Falling Girls, Evergreen), who executive produces. Glendyn Ivin (The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, Penguin Bloom) serves as lead director and executive producer, with New Zealand filmmaker Roseanne Liang (Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender) also directing.

Emmy nominee Rufus Sewell (The Diplomat, Scoop, The Father) leads the ensemble alongside Frances O’Connor (Wednesday, The Missing), Australian actress Alycia Debnam-Carey (Apple Cider Vinegar, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, Godzilla x Kong: Supernova) and New Zealand actor Te Kohe Tuhaka (Chief of War, The Convert, Kōkā).

“Shooting our first locally-commissioned series here in New Zealand is a huge moment for us,” said Amanda Duthie, Netflix’s content director for Australia and New Zealand. “This is a bold, propulsive story of power, class and family set against the opulent world of a luxury ski town, and we can’t wait for our members to fall in love with this series the way we have.”

Jodi Matterson (The Dry, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart) — who launched her Silent Firework banner in 2024 after exiting Bruna Papandrea’s Made Up Stories — executive produces alongside Libbie Doherty (Bluey, Crazy Fun Park) of Runaway Unicorn, with Jeremy Platt and Erika North rounding out the exec producer team.

Matterson and Doherty, in a joint statement, hailed Stearns as “an extraordinary new voice” — and predicted the series will become “audiences’ next obsession.”

The commission marks a notable step for Netflix’s originals strategy Down Under, which has so far centered on Australia with hits including Heartbreak High, Boy Swallows Universe and Apple Cider Vinegar. New Zealand, by contrast, has long served the streamer primarily as a spectacular production location — Sweet Tooth and Jane Campion’s Oscar-winning The Power of the Dog both shot there — without ever hosting a homegrown series of its own. The Queenstown production is backed by the New Zealand Film Commission and the country’s Screen Production Rebate. A premiere date has yet to be announced.