Jon Favreau

Jon Favreau spent the 1990s as a recognisable face rather than a name: a supporting turn in the football film Rudy in 1993, the Los Angeles comedy Swingers in 1996, then years of playing the friend, the lawyer, the guy at the bar in Very Bad Things, Deep Impact, The Replacements and Daredevil. Friends viewers know him as Pete Becker. He was in the room a long time before anyone handed him a camera.

Directing turned out to be the thing. Elf in 2003 got a durable Christmas comedy out of a premise that should have been unbearable, by holding its lead performance at exactly one degree below cartoon. Five years later Iron Man did something harder: it built a superhero blockbuster around loose, overlapping, half-improvised conversation, and nearly every Marvel film since has been cut to the pattern it set. Favreau then stayed inside the machine as Happy Hogan, a strange second career driving cars for a franchise he launched.

Technology is the real through-line. The Jungle Book and The Lion King pushed virtual production hard enough that the tooling came back around as The Mandalorian, the Star Wars series he created and which returned the property to episodic adventure. In between he made Chef, a small film about a cook who walks away from a restaurant, which reads like an autobiography written by a man who had just finished two enormous productions. He has an Emmy and two Saturn Awards, though the more telling credit is that the two biggest franchises in modern film both have his fingerprints on their machinery.