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Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg has invested in a “drone entertainment company” co-founded by Kimbal Musk, the brother of Elon Musk and a Tesla board member, as part of a $50mn fundraising aimed at creating a new form of family-friendly storytelling in the sky.
Katzenberg’s stake in Musk’s Nova Sky Stories marks his first foray into media since Quibi, an unsuccessful short-form streaming service that shut down in 2020 after only six months. He has mostly focused his investments on tech, including a $15.5mn investment this year in Creatify, an artificial intelligence video ad platform.
In an interview, Katzenberg said the Nova technology — which involves thousands of proprietary drones that act as “pixels” to form images in the sky — reminded him of “the original Pixar moment” when Steve Jobs and John Lasseter founded the computer animation company.
“I’ve seen it up there in the sky [and] it’s not like anything people have experienced before,” said Katzenberg, who produced Disney classics including The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast before going on to co-found DreamWorks. “It combines music and voice and the visual landscape.”
Katzenberg has joined the Nova board, and the company says his cash infusion will go towards building a studio of animators and storytellers. Nova is co-developing a “Sky Story”, which it describes as a “large-scale public experience”, that will debut next year.
Musk said he bought Nova in 2022 from Intel, after the company had put on drone shows at the Super Bowl and the Tokyo Olympics. But the unit struggled during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I acquired it [from Intel] so that the art form would continue to exist, and I was just absolutely blown away by what was actually possible,” Musk told the Financial Times.
Musk, who is also on the board of Burning Man, put on a drone show at the desert festival in 2022 and invited Katzenberg to watch it. “Jeffrey got to see some absolute magic in the sky,” he said.
Unlike the film business, live concerts, sport and other events have rebounded strongly since the end of the pandemic. But outdoor stadiums are underused and Musk sees an opportunity to attract families to them by offering his drone shows at far less than the cost of a sporting event or concert.
“People want to get out of the house,” Musk said. “The challenge with live concerts and theme parks is they’re very expensive. So our price point is more in the $40 to $50 range.”
Musk said the company was profitable and expected to sell tickets in 40 countries this year.
Katzenberg became a billionaire after the sale of DreamWorks, the animation studio he founded in 1994 with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, to Comcast in 2016 and has invested in dozens of companies since launching the WndrCo vehicle. He has also been deeply involved in Democratic party politics, but drew criticism last year when he served as co-chair of Joe Biden’s re-election campaign.