Director · Writer

Jonathan Liebesman

10 credited titles on WatchWise

Jonathan Liebesman was born in Johannesburg, South Africa on September 15, 1976. He would remain in his home country, studying filmmaking at the South African School of Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance, until 1996; that year, he traveled to New York City to visit his cousin who was attending New York University. Soon after the visit, Jonathan enrolled at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. For his student first film, Jonathan turned Roald Dahl's short story Genesis and Catastrophe (2000) into a 8-minute, award-winning short that help him land Hollywood representation; accolades included the 2000 Hollywood Film Festival's Young Filmmaker Award and the Austin Film Festival's Student Short Film Award. Jonathan would make his feature-film debut in 2002 with Darkness Falls (2003), a dark twist on the Tooth Fairy tale that opened at #1 at the box office despite being critically panned. It also served as the big-screen debut for Emma Caulfield Ford, long a fan-favorite as Anya Jenkins on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997). Rings (2005), his short film that connected The Ring (2002) and its sequel, was first released as a bonus disc with the re-release of The Ring on DVD. The short c

Commercial performance

Not enough verified figures yet — only 1 of 9 catalogued titles have publicly reported budget and worldwide gross. Many films (television, independent and regional cinema) never publish these numbers; where they exist, WatchWise fills them in automatically from TMDB and Wikipedia.