Kimbal Musk and Jeffrey Katzenberg are looking to turn their drone art company Nova Sky Stories into the next major form of live outdoor entertainment.
During a panel at TheWrap’s 2025 TheGrill conference, Katzenberg said that while the first two pillars — sports and music — have become annual multi-billion dollar businesses, their venues aren’t used year-round.
“They’re empty 300 days out of 365. So the venues actually are there. We don’t have to build theaters,” Katzenberg explained. “The beauty of this is you pack these things up into two 18-wheelers and it takes four people to fly a show … The big opportunity here is to create what can be the third pillar of live outdoor entertainment.”
Katzenberg and Musk are making this bet as drone shows have become an increasingly common sight, playing as a safer alternative to fireworks or after sporting events. Social feeds are filled with sophisticated images and even limited videos assembled thousands of flying devices. But they’ve largely been side acts, while Nova Sky Stories intends to be the main event.
In addition to producing original content, Nova Sky Stories is in talks with major studios including Disney, Universal, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount about adapting IP like “Shrek” and “How To Train Your Dragon” for storytelling in the sky.
“If you think about the movie of Lion King, it was adapted to the stage. It is the same story, but it’s told in a completely unique way that takes advantage of a theater,” Katzenberg said. “So now, move that to the next place, which is take advantage of this giant cube and the sky and this new technology. How do you adapt that storytelling? So some of the best movies and best IP in Hollywood will be part of what Nova does.”
“We really want this to be a storytelling medium,” Musk added. “Just like you’d go to a musical on Broadway, you’re having an experience and you’re sharing with your family and friends and you’re being moved emotionally. That’s our goal.”
A ‘religious experience’
In 2022, Musk acquired the drone technology from Intel, which was planning to shutter the project after working on it for 10 years (the chip company had notably deployed 250 drones for a show at the Bellagio fountains in Las Vegas during CES in 2018). He got turned on to the drone technology after working with the artists behind Nova on a 3,000-drone show for the Burning Man festival.
“The artists came to me that I was helping, mostly Burning Man artists, and they said, ‘Intel’s gonna shut this division down. Please help see if you can just talk them into not shutting it down,’” he said. “I went to speak to them and they said, ‘We either shut it down or you got to buy it from us.’ And I was like, ‘I never thought I’d be buying a division from Intel … And it’s been just an amazing journey.”
Katzenberg, who is an investor in the company through his firm WndrCo, recalled his “religious experience” of seeing Nova Sky Stories in person at Burning Man. He would reach out to Musk about five or six months later to collaborate.
“In either 1989 or 1990 I saw this Pixar short film called Luxor the Lamp, it was the original piece that John Lasseter made. First, I tried to hire John Lasseter, that didn’t work, then I tried to buy the company and that didn’t work. And then we made the three-picture deal. And that moment of seeing that short film, which to me, was like, ‘Oh my God, here is our future’ – I had that same feeling when I saw this 10 minutes that Kimball did for us this last May,” Katzenberg said. “That just started a conversation with us and I realized that what he is onto is actually a whole new platform, a new medium, a new stage for storytelling and the stage is the sky.”
Creating a viable business
Today, Nova Sky Stories is doing drone shows in 40 countries and on track to manufacture 12,000 drones by the end of 2025 and closer to 30,000 by the end of 2026.
The company has received interest from Abu Dhabi for a 10,000-drone fleet, while Europe and the U.S. each have fleets of around 4,000 drones. At the same time, Nova sold 6,000 tickets for its drone shows in 2024 and hit 200,000 as of last weekend.
Looking ahead, Musk and Katzenberg said they expect to sell around 500,000 tickets in Nova’s first year. They’ll also look at sponsorship opportunities to help make the business economically viable moving forward.
“I think we really can fill those stadiums. And because it’s digital art, you can really put so much human talent and resources into the content and at scale. So you can put tens of millions of dollars into a show. An adaptation of Shrek in the sky would take us a year or two,” Musk said. “Another thing that’s different about our stories is the technology keeps changing and the actual story changes as well. Once it’s out there, it doesn’t stop. It’s not in the can, it constantly evolves.”
Katzenberg predicted that, in the next 18 to 24 months, Nova Sky Stories would look similar to hand drawing as the technology advances.
“People think about what is the most basic version of a drone with a little flashing light on it. And that’s the first generation. We’re already onto the second or third generation, and the fourth and fifth, which are in the works right now, and we’ll start turning them out mid next year, allowing you to do all kinds of things that people have not really imagined yet,” Katzenberg said. “It’s just going to keep getting better. We’re at the very beginning of a technology revolution in entertainment.”
