Netflix says it has used AI on about 300 titles

Netflix has used artificial intelligence in some form on about 300 of its titles, a senior production executive said on October 10 at the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea.

Sung Q Lee, Netflix's senior director of production for Asia-Pacific, said the technology runs through the filmmaking process rather than sitting in one stage of it. "[AI] is being used in previsualization, production design, working out set-dressing concepts ahead of time, in editing and of course in VFX," Lee said, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. He added: "But the question that matters to me isn't, 'How much AI can we put into this title?' but, 'What more can this title do with AI's help?'"

The panel was part of Netflix's Creative Asia event, the streamer's program with BIFF for emerging Asian creators, now in its third year. Titled "AI in Filmmaking: New Tools, New Possibilities," it was co-hosted with the Motion Picture Association and moderated by the film critic Yun Sung-eun. The other speakers were the Korean director Kang Yun-sung, whose credits include The Outlaws, and Kimball Thurston, chief technology officer at the visual effects studio Weta FX.

Netflix's own recap of the day frames the discussion around support rather than replacement. Lee said earlier tools helped with the "how" of filmmaking but "never decided the 'why,' why we have to tell this story. AI is the same." He screened two clips: a reel from Eyeline, Netflix's VFX studio, on what the company calls hybrid production, which mixes live-action photography, visual effects and generative tools; and a sequence for the Netflix India title Glory in which AI and VFX built crowd scenes that tight budgets and schedules would otherwise have cut.

Kang brought the panel's hardest numbers, and a caution. His earlier film Run to the West opened in Korean cinemas last October and grossed about $100,000, according to The Hollywood Reporter, which described it as billed Korea's first feature to use AI across its entire production. He co-directed it with the AI filmmaker Kwon Han-seul, leaning on AI chiefly as a substitute for CG. "At the time, AI technology was at a really rudimentary, low level, so we mainly used it for compositing and making creatures," Kang said. "And back then, even the creatures didn't blend well with the footage we'd shot."

On his current project, The Gulf of Aden, a film built around military operations at sea, Kang said a test clip was made entirely with Kling, the video model from China. Variety reports he put AI's effect on a feature's production budget at 30% to 40% generally, and Kang told the room his own film's financing calculation landed near the top of that range. "When we calculated how much we'd save on 'The Gulf of Aden' for fundraising, it came to an actual reduction of around 40%," he said. "That's not just from replacing CG and VFX. The shoot itself got simpler, and it cut the overall production period to some extent."

Thurston drew the sharper boundary. He described Weta's use of the technology as "assistive AI," which in Variety's account is not "allowed to change the creative intent in any way." "It touches pixels, but it only fixes them," he said. Weta has used machine learning for at least a decade, and longer if early forms of its crowd system Massive count, Variety reports. Thurston named color as a problem the tools still have not solved. "If all your AI models have been trained on video images, you're not getting the right red for a Coca-Cola can," he said. "You get Netflix red, but not Coca-Cola." He said Weta is building an open-source tool through the Academy Software Foundation to track AI use and provenance, designed to link with initiatives such as C2PA, the content-credentials standard.

For creators selling into a market like this one, the panel moves two things. Netflix's 300-title figure comes from the buyer rather than a vendor pitching a tool, which treats generative and assistive AI as ordinary parts of production. The figure also stays broad: Lee did not say which titles, when, or how much of each used AI, and no outlet reported a breakdown. Kang's 40% is a financing estimate for one film, not a measured saving across the industry.

The Gulf of Aden is in production with Kling tools; the Busan International Film Festival runs through October 15.