While the entertainment industry fought a $110 billion battle between industry giants, Warner Bros, Netflix, Paramount Skydance and Comcast, over who would own the next decade of IP, producer Jamee Natella was making the same bet with her organisation, WordRide Impact years ahead of the giants and scaling growth through diverse perspectives.

Sammy Paul used to come to work because there was nowhere else for him to be. His mother, producer Jamee Natella, spent his childhood on production sets and airplanes, running an international film business that didn’t pause for school breaks. Somewhere along the way, he started asking questions, like why people in some countries drive on the opposite side of the road. She didn’t have a tidy answer. So she built one, in the form of a company. Today, Sam works with his mum, as he has taken on the role of chairs the Youth Consumer Board of WorldRide Impact , an initiative founded by Natella and along with other board members, aged between 8 – 17 years shape the strategy. Sammy Paul, who once tagged along because his mother had a production to run now has a formal seat in shaping hers.

The industry is having Jamee’s realization at scale

In 2026, the entertainment business spent most of the year locked in one of its largest corporate fights in a decade, a $110 billion bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery among Netflix, Paramount Skydance and Comcast, finally settled in February and expected to close before the end of this year. Strip away the size of the numbers, and the fight came down to one question industry analysts kept repeating: who gets to own the IP and control it end to end, from creation through distribution.

Jamee Natella has been quietly answering a smaller version of that same question for over two decades, and her answer has changed. For most of her career, she built her reputation executing other people’s ideas, commercials for Visa, Toyota and Virgin. Natella is currently serving as supervising producer on the upcoming biopic Nixon, starring Jon Voight, Sir Ben Kingsley, Rupert Everett, Dan Fogler, Jeremy Piven, Philip Winchester, and Charlie Weber. The film is slated for release through SP Media Group and Paramount Global. She also recently completed work as supervising producer on Christmas Family Feud and The Last Firefighter for SP Media Group, both slated for release through Paramount Global early next year.

The gap she noticed twice

Natella’s whole career has a pattern, and it isn’t reinvention. It’s noticing a gap and building the bridge across it - twice. The first time was in Tokyo in 1998. Western clients wanted to shoot there and had no way to navigate Japan’s production infrastructure or language. Natella, then in her twenties, founded Blueyed Pictures to be that bridge. What started as a service-production company grew into an international operation with offices in Los Angeles, London and Tokyo, producing branded entertainment and content for some of the world’s largest advertisers, in a partnership with BBDO that would last decades.

The second gap she noticed was in her own living room. Her son had absorbed more about how the world actually works different languages, different customs, different assumptions from tagging along on her productions than most classrooms could offer. Natella began wondering whether storytelling could do for other kids what travel had done for hers, without requiring an actual passport. That question became a children’s book, Sam in London: Cheeky Kids, Medieval Blokes, and Giant Trousers , the first title in her WorldRide Adventures series. Blending storytelling through different forms of media, she brings education, culture and adventure to help children explore the world, inspire curiosity, empathy and global understanding. Her approach is systematic in addressing gaps.

“Find where access is missing, build something that closes it, and don’t wait for someone else to do it first.”

What “impact” actually looks like on the ground

WorldRide Impact, is where the mission stops being a values statement, and becomes infrastructure for the action. It has renovated and now maintains a cultural-learning library inside a Los Angeles public school, restocking it with new books annually and pairing it with immersive technology. Through partnerships with Virgin Atlantic, WorldStrides and Camp Harmony, it funds travel scholarships that send students to experience another country firsthand, rather than read about one. Its World Cultural Day program, run for underserved children with limited resources, skips the worksheet entirely and teaches through three entry points kids already understand instinctively: food, art and sport.

The organization is also expanding an enrichment program with LAUSD and is currently running at Paul Revere Charter Middle School and The American School in Japan. These programs bring experiential cultural learning to a broader swath of the district. The experiential elements gives children a chance to taste and embed their learning rather than simply memorizing facts from a distance.

The producer without an ego

Natella built her international network the way most durable things in this industry get built: one production at a time, over decades, not for a pitch deck. She describes her leadership approach; “Hire excellent people, give them what they need, protect the project, and be someone they want to work with again.”

In an industry now scrambling to figure out how to retain creative talent amid AI disruption and consolidation, that’s a less glamorous competitive advantage than owning a franchise, but arguably a more durable one. She built that reputation in rooms where she was frequently the only woman, and often the only parent juggling a production schedule against a school calendar. Her response wasn’t to get louder. It was to get more reliable, know the job, keep her word, let the results speak. In a relationship-driven business, that turned out to be a form of currency that compounds.

The through-line, not the pivot

It would be easy to write Natella’s story as a clean break: producer becomes children’s-media founder, entertainment veteran becomes education entrepreneur. That version is more dramatic and less true. Her approach hasn’t changed, her formula is clear, identify the gap, find the right people, build the bridge, keep moving. What’s changed is simply whose vision she’s building now. Sammy Paul, once a kid on a film set with nowhere else to be, is now in the room helping decide what his mother’s company builds next. This not a sentimental footnote, but putting customer centricity at the heart of her organisation. Natella has created an organisation, WordRide Impact isn’t a leap from her first career, but instead a pivot continuing her honed skills in understand how to address problems and spot opportunities before other see them. Now she’s creating a legacy to strengthen much needed skills and awareness to the next generation.