Lorenzo di Bonaventura


Lorenzo di Bonaventura is an American film producer and founder and owner of Di Bonaventura Pictures. He is best known for producing the Transformers film series. The films he has produced have made over $7 billion at the box office.

Life and career

Di Bonaventura spent the 1990s as an executive at Warner Bros. Pictures, eventually rising to president of worldwide production. His production company Di Bonaventura Pictures is based at Paramount Pictures. His tenure at Warner Bros. included discovering and shepherding The Matrix into production, and the purchase of the rights to the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling.
Di Bonaventura has purchased the film rights to the six-part series of fantasy novels The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel by Michael Scott. Di Bonaventura said that Scott's "fantastic series is a natural evolution from 'Harry Potter'."
In the documentary Side by Side, he criticized the ubiquitousness of inexpensive high quality cameras for essentially allowing anyone to become a filmmaker, potentially saturating the media landscape with awful entertainment that the masses wouldn't be able to distinguish from works by conventionally trained persons. This new media landscape is flawed due to lack of a "tastemaker"—similar to how Steve Jobs complained that journalistic editorial content was now sorely lacking, mentioned at one of the Some Things Digital conferences.

Personal life

Di Bonaventura graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall and Harvard University. He later received an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His father, Mario di Bonaventura, was a symphony conductor, and his uncle, Anthony di Bonaventura, was a concert pianist.
Di Bonaventura serves as chair of the Creative Council for Represent.Us, a nonpartisan anti-corruption organization. He has served on the Claremont Graduate University Board of Trustees since 2015.

Filmography

Television