Billionaire film director Peter Jackson, best known for being behind the blockbuster “Lord of the Rings” series, has become the latest high-profile investor in a startup that has made a name for itself by attempting to bring back the extinct dodo bird and woolly mammoths.
HOLLYWOOD, CA - DECEMBER 09: Writer/director/producer Peter Jackson attends the premiere of New ... [+]
Jackson, with his partner Fran Walsh, invested $10 million into Dallas-based Colossal Biosciences to help preserve existing species and restore species like the extinct dodo bird, Bloomberg first reported.
Jackson joins a pool of investors who have put up $235 million in total, including venture capital firms like Winklevoss Capital Management, as well as actor Chris Hemsworth, Hilton heiress Paris Hilton, NFL legend Tom Brady, golfing great Tiger Woods, Legendary Pictures founder and technology billionaire Thomas Tull (producer of the movie “Jurassic World”), among others.
Entrepreneur Ben Lamm founded Colossal Biosciences in 2021 with George Church, a geneticist known for his work with genetic sequencing and the Human Genome Project, to continue Church’s longtime, yet slow-going project to revive the woolly mammoth (at one time, Church even received $100,000 from Peter Thiel for research), The New York Times reports.
With the funding, the company plans to, for example, rewrite elephant DNA with mammoth genes to create a mammoth-like embryo, and the company’s goal has expanded to editing and re-writing DNA to restore or preserve several extinct animals like the dodo bird or Tasmanian tiger.
Investors in the company have received returns through acquiring equity for Colossal spinoff companies that aim to help conserve other species, according to Bloomberg.
“It’s a special privilege to helm Colossal and be supported by visionaries, entrepreneurs and industry leaders,” Lamm told Forbes, calling Jackson and his partner “mission-aligned” and impassioned about “conservation and biodiversity restoration.”
Forbes estimates the director’s net worth at about $1.5 billion. He reached billionaire status in 2021 when he sold a portion of his digital effects studio, then called Weta Digital, to Unity Software for $1.6 billion in cash and stock.
Before achieving billionaire status, Jackson made tens of millions from making the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy (2001-2003) and the “Hobbit” films (2012-2014). Jackson’s studio was prized for its advanced custom software that could generate and render images like the character Gollum in the “Lord of the Rings” or the “Avatar” movies’ planet of blue-skinned aliens. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav announced earlier this year that Jackson would be producing a new “Lord of the Rings” movie, centered on Gollum, with an expected release date in 2026.
Jackson has a collection of movie memorabilia stored in Wellington, New Zealand. His collection spans “James Bond” movie posters and cartoon sketches to military helmets, to props used in some of his earliest films, according to Empire.