James Dodson

In 1996 when Titanic went $100 million over budget, 20th Century Fox fired nearly it’s entire production department. The new president of production, Joe Hartwick hired James Dodson to become Vice President of Production for Fox Features. Hartwick hired Dodson because of Dodson’s impressive experience producing very low budget indie features with surprisingly high production values. Dodson’s mandate at Fox was to bring that same ingenuity and out-of-the box filmmaking style to the Fox studio system.

While at Fox, Dodson worked with such filmmakers as Joel Schumacher, the Hughes Bros., Steven Soderbergh and John Davis. The year Paramount produced an action military film, “Rules of Engagement” for $65m one of Dodson’s personal favorites achievements was bringing in a very similarly sized massive action film, Behind Enemy Lines, starring Gene Hackman and Owen Wilson at $39 million. After 4 ½ years at Fox Dodson wanted to return to producing.

Dodson’s most recent television project was producing Season 1 (10 episodes) of “The Night Agent” for Sony TV/Netflix. The project reunited him with Showrunner Shawn Ryan with whom he worked on the two-episode series finale of, Timeless, for Sony TV and NBC.

The Night Agent was the #1 Tv Series on Netflix for several weeks and is in the Netflix top 10 Most world-wide Viewed series of all-time. Prior to that Mr. Dodson produced three episodes of 2022’s critically acclaimed, “A League of Their Own” for Sony TV/Amazon which was #1 on Amazon for several weeks. James is also known for writing, producing and directing, “Behind Enemy Lines 2”, for 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. To date it is the highest grossing action picture ever produced by this Division.

James also executive produced the feature film, Replicas in San Juan, Puerto Rico. It stars Keanu Reeves and Thomas Middleditch and was produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura. Prior to that, Dodson was chosen by Academy-Award Winning writer/director, Stephen Gaghan to line produce and 2nd unit direct AMC Networks’ Pilot, White City, which he produced in Marrakech, Morocco.

Prior to that, Dodson executive produced 20th Century Fox’s horror film, “Chronicle”. Fox President, Tom Rothman wanted to make the film for under $15 million, but when Dodson was brought on board, the Fox production dept. had already budgeted the picture at $45 million including $16 million in VFX. Without cutting a single page of the script or any of the visual effects, Dodson reconceived and re-budgeted the film; identified and negotiated new VFX vendors and produced the entire picture for $13.9 million all-in. The film opened at #1 in America and has grossed over $125 million worldwide.

Dodson is also an accomplished screenwriter having written 13 screenplays including Behind Enemy Lines 2 and the Omen 2 for Fox Home Entertainment and 3 television pilots for NBC/Universal including the TV adaptation of, “Thank You for Smoking”.

Mr. Dodson enjoys producing in distant locations having worked in Mumbai, Slovakia, Prague, South Africa, Bulgaria, Vancouver, New Orleans, Puerto Rico, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Miami and Marrakech, Morocco.