Last week, at a quarterly earnings call, Netflix‘s co-CEO Ted Sarandos disclosed that the streaming service’s TV series The Eternaut (El Eternauta in Spanish) used generative AI. The Argentinian show, based on the 1957 sci-fi comic by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López, was revealed to have used AI in a shot of a collapsing building in Buenos Aires, making it the first Netflix series or film to feature the technology.
Per the official transcript, Sarandos said, “Our Eyeline team [part of Netflix’s studio Scanline VFX] partnered with [the show’s] creative team. Using AI-powered tools, they were able to achieve an amazing result with remarkable speed and in fact, that VFX sequence was completed 10 times faster than it could have been completed with visual-traditional VFX tools and workflows. And also, the cost of it just wouldn’t have been feasible for a show on that budget.”
Unsurprisingly, given all the ethical issues with generative AI, the news has not gone down well. Derf Backderf commented, “The Eternaut is holy. It cost Oesterheld his life, disappeared and murdered by the Argentine Junta during their bloody rule [in 1977]. Along with his [four] daughters and their husbands. Solano fled into exile in Spain and lived. Fuck you, Netflix.”
Alex de Campi stated, “The Eternaut (Oesterheld/Breccia) is one of the greatest comics ever created. It was created in a time of rising political dictatorship and its author was ‘disappeared’ a few years later. I beg you to go and read it. It is the last story on earth that should have gotten the AI slop treatment.”
Sarandos prefaced his comments acknowledging one widely-discussed issue with GenAI, saying, “We remain convinced that AI represents an incredible opportunity to help creators make films and series better, not just cheaper. They’re AI-powered creator tools. So this is real people doing real work with better tools. Our creators are already seeing the benefits in production through pre-visualization and shot planning work and certainly, visual effects. It used to be that only big budget projects would have access to advanced visual effects like de-aging.” (This is presumably a reference to Robert Zemeckis‘s Here, which used AI to de-age its cast during filming.)
The notion of using AI to save money has been discussed by other major media figures: Marvel’s Kevin Feige mentioned it briefly in an interview this week, where he noted he doesn’t know if that would be the case, while director James Cameron has said that AI could the key to ensuring “big effects-heavy, CG-heavy films” remain affordable, but that it “[should] not [come at the cost of] laying off half the staff and at the effects company.” Although Cameron has joined the board of the company Stability AI to get a front row view of “the space,” he has boasted his next film, Avatar: Fire and Ash, will feature a disclaimer saying “no generative AI was used in the making of this movie.”
Developed by Bruno Stagnaro, the first season of Netflix’s The Eternaut was released on April 30, 2025, to positive reviews, and topped the streamer’s global Top 10 of non-English language series for that week. Its production provided a boon for Argentina’s economy, injecting 41 billion pesos ($33 million) into the country’s finances, and sparked a renewed interest in the whereabouts of Oesterheld’s descendants. A second, longer season that will conclude the show is in development; whether the backlash towards it in the wake of this news will affect its renewal remains to be seen.
