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Nina Jacobson (born September 15, 1965) is an American film executive who, until July 2006, was president of the Buena Vista Motion Pictures Group, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. With Dawn Steel, Gail Berman and Sherry Lansing, she was one of the last of a handful of women to head a Hollywood film studio since the 1980s. She established her own production company called Color Force in 2007, and was the producer of The Hunger Games film series.
Jacobson is married to Jen Bleakley, with whom she has three children. In 1995, she and American Beauty producer Bruce Cohen formed Out There, a collection of gay and lesbian Entertainment activists.
Later, Jacobson became a senior film executive at DreamWorks SKG where she was responsible for developing What Lies Beneath. She also takes credit for the idea behind DreamWorks' first animated feature Antz. Speaking of her mode of working while listening to pitches for new films, she said, "We start with the obligatory chat about the weather, traffic, sports or politics. Then somebody concludes the chitchat (usually me) and the writer does his or her schpiel. The 'dog and pony.' The desired outcome is for me to love the story and want to buy it. But a big part of my job is to pass. I leap only once every six to eight weeks."Matt Goldberg, February 1997, "The Meeting I Never Miss"
Closely associated with film director M. Night Shyamalan at Disney (besides The Sixth Sense, she also worked with him on Unbreakable, Signs and The Village), she and Shyamalan clashed during pre-production of his 2006 film, Lady in the Water. Shyamalan left the studio after Jacobson and others became, in Shyamalan's eyes, overly critical of his script, which would eventually be produced by Warner Bros. Shyamalan is quoted in a book about the difficult period that he "had witnessed the decay of her creative vision right before his own wide-open eyes. She didn't want iconoclastic directors. She wanted directors who made money." In her own defense, Jacobson said, "in order to have a Hollywood relationship more closely approximate a real relationship, you have to have a genuine back and forth of the good and the bad. Different people have different ideas about respect. For us, being honest is the greatest show of respect for a filmmaker." Los Angeles Times (June 23, 2006): "Book Tells of Breakup with Disney"
By the start of 2007, she was back at work, this time at her own newly established production company, Color Force. Color Force signed a three-year "first-look" production deal with DreamWorks in December 2006. The first feature project released in theaters was Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2010).Los Angeles Times, April 2, 2010 "Fox Will Make a 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' Sequel" She also produced the 2011 feature One Day.
Jacobson produced all of the films based on the bestselling Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. The first of the four films based on the trilogy was released on March 23, 2012.
In 2015, Color Force mounted its first television series, , based on Jeffrey Toobin's 1997 book, The Run of His Life.
Color Force produced the film adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians, which was released in 2018 to general acclaim. The Hollywood Reporter presented Jacobson with its third annual Equity in Entertainment award at its 2018 Women in Entertainment event on December 5, 2018. Previous Equity in Entertainment award winners include Ryan Murphy and Amy Pascal.
Jacobson produced the 2019 film adaptation of the bestselling novel Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple which according to the critic's consensus of Rotten Tomatoes "offers dispiriting proof that a talented director, bestselling source material, and terrific cast can add up to far less than the sum of their parts." Jacobson and her production company Color Force also acquired and produced the 2019 adaptation of Donna Tartt's Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Goldfinch which despite the novel's devoted fanbase was universally panned by critics and was named one of the worst films of the year by CBS News. It lost over $50 million, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Production executive
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