Katzenberg believes that drones are poised to redefine entertainment, and he’s teaming up with Nova Sky Stories—the live drone entertainment company founded and led by Kimbal Musk—to help shape that future. On Friday, the company announced that Katzenberg is joining as a strategic advisor and that WndrCo, the tech investment firm he cofounded, is taking part in a broader $50 million funding round.
Innovation in drone hardware technology and programming, combined with Musk’s creative vision for the medium, has opened up a “completely new canvas for storytelling,” Katzenberg told Fortune in an interview ahead of the announcement.
“We’re going to create original characters and original stories that can only be told with this technology. The only way you can tell these stories will be up in the sky, in dimension, hopefully engaging interactively with the audience,” Katzenberg said.
As Nova Sky Stories strives to achieve drone entertainment’s Snow White moment, Musk says the company is focused on things like adding voice and interactive elements.
“We’re innovating on an actual character that will speak to the audience, or interact with the audience,” Musk tells Fortune, noting that unlike a two-dimensional screen, drones are a physical medium. “The character can come 10 feet away from you.”
Katzenberg, who oversaw some of Disney’s biggest animated hits in the 1980s and early 1990s, and then pioneered computer-generated animated movies at Dreamworks, is the perfect partner for Nova Sky, says Musk. The first drone show codeveloped with Katzenberg will debut in 2026. The company will be building up a library of intellectual property, Katzenberg says, as it pursues the goal of putting on drone shows of “branded family entertainment” to audiences of 50,000 to 80,000 people at stadiums around the world.
“When you think of it today, those stadiums more often than not are empty,“ says Katzenberg. “There are pretty much two things in those stadiums today: great sporting events … and concerts,” he says. “Well, what’s to say that five years from now there isn’t a third leg to that stool?”
“This is a cash-positive business,” Katzenberg says, “so that capital is to go out and scale and build the fleet.”
