Personal info
Known for
Actor
Gender
Male
Birthday
13 January
Location
New York, United States
Edit pageLorenzo di Bonaventura
Biography
Lorenzo di Bonaventura (Italian pronunciation: [loˈrɛntso di ˌbɔnavenˈtuːra]; born January 13, 1957) is an American film producer and founder and owner of Di Bonaventura Pictures. He is best known for producing the G.I. Joe and Transformers film series. The films he produced have earned over $7 billion at the box office.
Di Bonaventura spent the 1990s as an executive in the film industry eventually rising to president of worldwide production for Warner Bros. Pictures. His production company -- Di Bonaventura Pictures—is based at Paramount Pictures. His tenure at Warner Bros. included discovering and shepherding The Matrix into production, purchasing the rights to the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling.
In 2007 Di Bonaventura 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, Di Bonaventura criticized the ubiquitousness of inexpensive digital cameras that allow anyone to become a filmmaker, potentially saturating the media landscape with awful entertainment that the public wouldn't be able to distinguish from quality works. His argument stated that the new media landscape is flawed due to the lack of a "tastemaker."
Di Bonaventura graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall and Harvard University, where he played soccer. 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.
