Netflix had used AI in a show for the first time last year, and it’s now gone ahead and used it in 300 more.
That jump came up on the company’s second quarter earnings call, where co-CEO Ted Sarandos was asked about the impact of InterPositive, the AI filmmaking startup Netflix acquired from Ben Affleck earlier this year. Sarandos said it’s still early days for that particular acquisition, but that generative AI as a whole is now showing up across hundreds of Netflix productions, thanks to a combination of tools that includes InterPositive, the company’s Eyeline unit, and an internal animation lab.
“GenAI is scaling quickly across the entire creative process, from concept to previs, through post and delivery. We’re making higher quality output more quickly and efficiently than we could have using traditional methods,” Sarandos said. He added that GenAI workflows have now been used in roughly 300 of Netflix’s titles, with the heaviest concentration in post-production, where the company is applying it to shots and sequences that would otherwise be too complicated or expensive to pull off.
The first time Netflix disclosed using generative AI on a show was with The Eternauts, an Argentine science fiction series, where a building collapse sequence was created using AI-powered VFX instead of traditional methods. Sarandos had said at the time that the AI approach was roughly ten times faster and considerably cheaper than the conventional route. Going from one disclosed instance to 300 titles in the span of about a year gives a sense of how quickly Netflix has folded these tools into its production pipeline.
Sarandos gave crowd enhancement and historical battle scenes as examples of where GenAI is making a difference. According to him, productions have often had to simply cut such sequences from scripts in the past because there wasn’t enough budget or time to execute them properly. With generative tools now available, those scenes are being kept in rather than written out.
Netflix has been careful to frame this as a tool for filmmakers rather than a replacement for them. Sarandos reiterated that stance on the call, saying that great artists are still what makes something great, and that AI simply gives creatives better tools to execute their vision. It’s a line the company has repeated since its $587 million acquisition of InterPositive, a deal that brought Affleck on board as a senior adviser and folded his entire engineering and creative team into Netflix.
The scale at which Netflix is deploying these tools does raise questions for the wider VFX industry, particularly for the artists in India, South Korea, the Philippines and Latin America who currently do much of the frame-by-frame work that tools like InterPositive are designed to speed up. Netflix has said it doesn’t plan to license InterPositive’s technology to other studios, keeping the tooling as an internal advantage rather than a product it sells.
For now, the company’s messaging is consistent: AI is being positioned as an efficiency layer sitting underneath the creative process, not a replacement for the people running it. Whether that framing survives contact with an industry already anxious about automation is a separate question, and one Netflix’s next few earnings calls will likely have to keep answering.