From Shrek to The Lion King’s Simba, Jeffrey Katzenberg is behind some of the most iconic animated characters to appear on the big screen. His next creation aims for an even bigger screen: the sky.
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.
Founded by Musk during the pandemic, Nova Sky Stories acquired chipmaker Intel’s drone business and its fleet of 9,000 drones in 2022. Since then, Musk’s company has worked to improve the capabilities of the drones and of the airborne shows that the drones put on, extending the duration and sophistication of the performances. One of Nova Sky’s early performances was an event at the Burning Man festival in 2022 that Katzenberg, who attended the festival, had witnessed. A swarm of 1,000 drones conjured a giant morphing face that hovered over the revelers.
Musk, who is a board member at SpaceX and Tesla, which are part of his brother Elon’s business empire, likens drone entertainment today to the early days of Disney’s animation efforts. The eight-minute black-and-white cartoon reel Steamboat Willie, released in 1928, showed the potential of combining animation with a synchronized soundtrack. Within 10 years, Disney made Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first feature-length animated film, and still considered one of the greatest films of all time.
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?”
As for the drones themselves, Nova Sky does not disclose the cost of each machine. But the plan is to build a lot more—up to 25,000 next year, says Musk. The $50 million funding, Nova Sky’s first since it acquired the Intel drone business, will help.
“This is a cash-positive business,” Katzenberg says, “so that capital is to go out and scale and build the fleet.”
