Quick Facts
Biography
Sean Bailey is a film and television producer based in Los Angeles who currently serves as president of production at Walt Disney Studios.
Career
As a co-founder and executive of LivePlanet, Bailey served as executive producer for The Emperor's Club, the Emmy Award-nominated Project Greenlight, Push, Nevada (which he also co-wrote with Ben Affleck), producer Best Laid Plans, Matchstick Men, and Gone Baby Gone.
From 2004 to 2008, Bailey continued as chairman and board member of LivePlanet while under a writing-producing deal at ABC Studios.
In 2008, the film wing of LivePlanet was dissolved and Bailey teamed with Disney to form the production banner Idealogy Inc, which produced Tron: Legacy, the sequel to the 1982 film Tron. In November 2009, it was announced that Bailey would produce a remake of the 1979 film The Black Hole, which never materialized. He co-wrote (with Ted Griffin) the original screenplay for the 2016 film Solace, starring Anthony Hopkins and Colin Farrell.
In January 2010, Bailey was named president of production at Walt Disney Studios, overseeing live-action films produced by Walt Disney Pictures. Under Bailey, Walt Disney Pictures pursued a tentpole film strategy, which included an expanded slate of large-budget films, including franchise sequels, original films, and live-action adaptations of their animated films. The studio found particular success with the latter type of films, which began with the commercial success of Alice in Wonderland (2010), and continued with Maleficent (2014), Cinderella (2015), The Jungle Book (2016),Pete's Dragon (2016), Beauty and the Beast (2017), Aladdin (2019), and The Lion King (2019), alongside other fairy-tale properties such as Oz The Great and Powerful (2013) and Into the Woods (2014). Other tentpole films including The Lone Ranger (2013), Tomorrowland (2015) and literary adaptations of John Carter (2012), The BFG (2016), and A Wrinkle in Time (2018), became box-office disappointments. Despite the renewed focus on tentpole films, the studio continued to produce smaller, "brand-deposit" films, such as The Muppets (2011) and Saving Mr. Banks (2013), a period drama which was the first time the studio had depicted its co-founder onscreen.
In 2012, Bailey was named to the board of Sundance Institute. In 2015, he joined the Board of Trustees at Caltech.