Netflix’s latest acquisition is threatening thousands of livelihoods from Los Angeles to Mumbai.

On March 5, Netflix acquired InterPositive, an artificial intelligence company built by Hollywood actor Ben Affleck, for an undisclosed sum. InterPositive automates color grading, relighting, and continuity fixes. This work is currently done frame by frame by artists in India, South Korea, the Philippines, and Latin America. More than 2 million professionals work in visual effects globally.

Netflix has said it would share the technology only with in-house creative partners and not with rival production companies. Affleck will work with Netflix as a senior adviser.

While AI had already been eroding visual effects jobs before InterPositive, the Affleck name has turned a quiet industry shift into a global conversation. The impact will be hardest on entry-level workers, according to Mohsin Kazi, a compositing supervisor at DNEG, the eight-time Oscar-winning visual effects company behind Dune, Interstellar, and Blade Runner 2049.

“If AI tools begin handling tasks like cleanup, relighting, or even base compositing, the biggest impact will be at that entry level,” Kazi told Rest of World. “Those early-stage opportunities are where artists traditionally learn by doing.”

About 75% of entertainment industry executives were already using AI to remove, reduce, or consolidate jobs in 2023, according to a study commissioned by the Animation Guild, the Concept Art Association, and other Hollywood labor groups, which surveyed 300 participants. The study estimated that as many as 118,500 positions could be lost within three years, with 80% of early adopters deploying AI in post-production.

Those projections measured the U.S. impact alone. The global figure has yet to be quantified.

Some industry experts have argued that AI efficiency gains will lead Netflix and other streamers to commission more productions, creating new work to replace what is lost. The logic falls apart against the reality of an industry that has been contracting, not expanding, Kimberly Owczarski, an associate professor of film, television, and digital media at Texas Christian University, told Rest of World.

The jobs AI creates may not be the same — or as many — as the jobs that it replaces in the coming years.”

Los Angeles County alone has lost 41,000 film and television jobs in three years, a quarter of its entertainment workforce.

“That seems unlikely, given the shrinkage in the overall number of film and TV series productions in recent years across the globe,” Owczarski said.

Netflix, which commissions content in dozens of countries, had more than 325 million subscribers at the end of last year, and generated $45.2 billion in revenue. The company did not respond to Rest of World’s questions about the impact of its AI capabilities on its international post-production workforce.

More than 90% of Hollywood’s rotoscoping work is done in India, according to Joseph Bell, author of the Visual Effects & Animation World Atlas, a comprehensive global survey of the industry’s workforce. Rotoscoping is the painstaking, frame-by-frame tracing of shapes in live-action footage that allows visual effects to be layered into a scene.

“AI will get there sooner than later, but at the time of writing, the technology hasn’t swept away those jobs yet,” Bell told Rest of World. “The jobs AI creates may not be the same — or as many — as the jobs that it replaces in the coming years, but it’s not a one-way street.”

Even before the InterPositive acquisition, Netflix had been investing in AI-powered production. The InterPositive deal gives the streaming giant proprietary tools to push that approach further and faster.

Hollywood’s biggest players have been racing to stake their claims in AI.

Disney invested $1 billion in OpenAI in December 2025, licensing more than 200 characters from Marvel, Pixar, and the Star Wars franchise to the company’s Sora video platform.

The fragility of the industry that InterPositive now threatens was exposed weeks before the acquisition. Paris-based Technicolor, one of the world’s largest visual effects companies and a key vendor for Disney, Paramount, and Netflix, collapsed under unsustainable debt and abruptly shut down its India operations in February 2025. About 3,000 workers in  Bengaluru and Mumbai were left without pay, without notice, and without severance.

Netflix opened a new facility called Eyeline Studios on March 12 in Hyderabad, a southern Indian tech hub. The 2,973-square-meter (32,000-square-foot) facility is designed for what Netflix calls “generative virtual effects.”

Netflix described its approach to AI as focused on “meaningfully serving the needs of the creative community,” according to a statement from chief product and technology officer Elizabeth Stone on its website. The company has not said whether VFX studios and production houses in India, South Korea, or Latin America that currently work on Netflix originals will qualify as “creative partners” with access to InterPositive’s capabilities.

In the U.S., studios are in contract negotiations with the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the Writers Guild of America, and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. AI protections are a central demand. The post-production workers across India, South Korea, and elsewhere, who serve many of the same studios and streamers, have no equivalent representation.

“Conversations are happening, but mostly informally — within teams, studios, or peer groups — rather than through organized industry channels,” Kazi said.

The perception of what AI can do is already moving faster than the technology itself, Bell said.

“Even though AI may not yet be able to do your job, the fact your client or your manager thinks it can is enough to disrupt project budgets, schedules, and employment,” he said.