Sean Bailey is a television and film producer based in Los Angeles who currently serves as president of production at Walt Disney Pictures.
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. The film's soundtrack was composed by Daft Punk and was nominated for Best Score Soundtrack Album for Visual Media at the 54th Grammy Awards. In November 2009, it was announced that Bailey would produce a remake of the 1979 film The Black Hole. 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 The Walt Disney Studios, overseeing the live-action films produced by Walt Disney Pictures. Under Bailey, Walt Disney Pictures pursued a strategy of developing Disney animated classics as new live-action films, including the Sleeping Beauty retelling Maleficent (2014), and Cinderella (2015), re-imagining Disney's 1950 film, alongside other fairy-tale properties such as Oz The Great and Powerful (2013) and Into the Woods (2014). In 2016, Disney was scheduled to release The Jungle Book, a state-of-the-art hybrid of live-action and computer-generated imagery; Alice Through the Looking Glass, a follow-up to 2010's Alice in Wonderland; and Pete's Dragon, based on Disney's 1977 film. In 2017, it will release Beauty and the Beast, a live-action adaptation of Disney's 1991 musical, with Emma Watson as Belle. Disney was also developing sequels to Maleficent and The Jungle Book; Cruella, starring Emma Stone as the villain from One Hundred and One Dalmatians; a Dumbo adaptation directed by Tim Burton; a sequel to Mary Poppins directed by Rob Marshall and starring Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda; A Wrinkle in Time directed by Ava DuVernay; and Jungle Cruise, starring Dwayne Johnson and based on the Disneyland attraction. Walt Disney Pictures also produced the Academy Award-nominated 2013 film Saving Mr. Banks, a period drama centered on the making of Mary Poppins starring Tom Hanks as Walt Disney and Emma Thompson as P.L. Travers, which was the first time the studio had depicted its founder onscreen.
In 2012, Bailey was named to the board of Sundance Institute. In 2015, he joined the Board of Trustees at Caltech.