Former Disney and MetaMedia Executive Jason Brenek Tapped as CEO of Fathom Entertainment
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Fathom Entertainment has named Jason Brenek as its new Chief Executive Officer, succeeding Ray Nutt, who announced his retirement earlier this year. Brenek arrives with an unusual combination of backgrounds — theatrical marketing and distribution, cinema technology and cloud-based content delivery — that maps closely to what Fathom has been building toward as it expands beyond its event cinema roots into broader specialty theatrical distribution.
Fathom is co-owned by AMC, Cinemark and Regal, which together operate more than 19,000 screens across the United States. The company has been in the process of rebranding from Fathom Events to Fathom Entertainment, a shift that reflects its ambitions to function as a full-service specialty distributor rather than simply an event programming operation. Its most significant test of that expanded mandate comes in October, when it will release Wildwood — the new stop-motion feature from LAIKA — in wide theatrical distribution nationwide, the most prominent traditional distribution play the company has attempted.
Brenek most recently founded and led MetaMedia, a cloud-based platform for delivering movies, live events and premium content to cinemas at scale. During his tenure the platform handled concerts from Garth Brooks, Coldplay, Metallica, Bon Jovi and Blake Shelton, live sports from ESPN, NCAA, WWE and UFC, and esports programming from Activision Blizzard and Epic Games, reaching more than 600 cinemas across 30 chains worldwide before MetaMedia was acquired by Qube Cinema in 2025. Before that he was Executive Vice President of IMAX Corporation and President of IMAX HOME.
Before IMAX, he spent more than a decade at Disney, where as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Digital Cinema and Cinema Programming he oversaw the global transition from analog to digital projection — chairing Digital Cinema Initiatives and negotiating the financing and deployment deals that made that transition happen — while also managing Disney’s 3D and event cinema programming and co-producing two Disney feature films. He was also SVP of International In-Home, running a multi-billion-dollar division covering streaming and television distribution in more than 70 countries. In 2025 he received the International 3D and Advanced Imaging Society’s first-ever Founders Award.
“Jason is the right leader to build on Fathom’s remarkable foundation of success in theatrical distribution and take the company into its next era of growth,” said Adam Rymer, Chief Commercial Officer at Regal Global Entertainment, speaking on behalf of the Fathom board through a press release. “Jason’s expertise across theatrical distribution, content and event cinema production and marketing, and technology, combined with a history of working with Fathom and a deep understanding and appreciation of the company, made him the clear choice. We are grateful to Ray Nutt for the extraordinary legacy he leaves behind and thrilled to see what Jason and the incredible team at Fathom will build from here.”
Brenek explained what drew him to the role. “There are very few companies in this industry that genuinely expand what the moviegoing experience can be,” he said. “Fathom created the category of ‘event cinema,’ and I have admired what this team has built for well over a decade. Having had the opportunity to work with Fathom at different points in my career, I have seen firsthand the care and creativity this organization brings to content producers, cinema partners, and millions of consumers. Under Ray’s leadership, Fathom has grown into something truly special during this period of radical change in the broader business of entertainment — a company with a devoted audience, a distinct identity, and a real and expanding role in the theatrical landscape.”
He continued: “My focus will be on expanding and elevating the content we bring to the big screen, deepening the relationships we have with our exhibitor and content partners, and growing Fathom’s reach and relevance in ways that deliver communal experiences to audiences and grow the broader entertainment ecosystem. I could not be more pleased to lead this company into its next chapter.”
Information sourced from Fathom Entertainment.
