Edward Saatchi

Edward Saatchi is a British entrepreneur and producer who was part of the founding team of Oculus Story Studio, the virtual reality film unit of Oculus VR, and who later co-founded Fable Studio with Pete Billington. He was a producer at Oculus Story Studio and is listed in the production credits of Dear Angelica, the film for which the studio built the in-VR painting tool Quill. After Facebook closed Story Studio in May 2017, Fable continued the studio's unfinished adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's The Wolves in the Walls; Saatchi was credited as executive producer when the project won a 2019 Primetime Emmy Award and a 2022 Peabody Award.

From 2018 Saatchi argued publicly that VR films were not the future of interactive storytelling and that interactive characters were. As chief executive of Fable he moved the company away from VR experiences toward AI-driven "virtual beings" in 2019, and later toward generative AI television through the Showrunner service.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Fact-checked every claim against the cited TechCrunch, Cartoon Brew, UploadVR, Engadget, Road to VR, VentureBeat, Television Academy, Peabody, Annecy, AWE, Tribeca, Jewish Chronicle, Campaigns & Elections, GamesBeat and TheWrap sources. About review dates.

Early career and NationalField

Saatchi is the son of the advertising executive Maurice Saatchi and Josephine Hart. Before his VR work he worked on Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. A campaign colleague, Alex Lofton, told TechCrunch in 2011 that Saatchi had phoned him in 2007, while Lofton was working in the field in Savannah, Georgia, and had turned up the next day and been put to work straight away. According to The Jewish Chronicle, Saatchi and his later co-founders Aharon Wasserman and Justin Lewis were field directors on the campaign and built a tracking tool for their own regions that the campaign then adopted more widely.

The three turned that tool into a company, NationalField, which Campaigns & Elections described as founded in 2008 by three former Obama staffers while they were working on the campaign in Georgia. NationalField used a Facebook-like interface in which field organizers reported their own activity, such as the number of calls made and contacts reached, so that managers could follow progress across a campaign's hierarchy. By 2011 Saatchi was the company's chief executive. That year TechCrunch reported that NationalField had completed Series A funding, that it could also be used by large organizations, and that the Democratic Party was expected to use it for the 2012 Obama re-election campaign. NGP VAN announced on 14 November 2013 that it had acquired NationalField; the founders were to join NGP VAN as senior staff, and Campaigns & Elections did not report the terms. Speaker biographies published by the Augmented World Expo state that NationalField worked on both the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns and that Saatchi was named to a Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Oculus Story Studio

Oculus publicly launched Oculus Story Studio at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2015, where it showed its first short, Lost. TechCrunch described the original team as about ten people, led by creative director Saschka Unseld and supervising technical director Max Planck, and including "experienced producer Edward Saatchi". Cartoon Brew wrote that the team was "headed by software developer Edward Saatchi". Engadget later described him as having helped found the studio, and AWE speaker biographies call him a co-founder and the producer of Story Studio's Lost, Henry, Dear Angelica and Quill. The 2018 Tribeca Festival program described him as the "Emmy Award-winning Producer of VR film Henry"; the Television Academy lists Henry as the 2016 winner for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media (Original Interactive Program), crediting Oculus Story Studio rather than individuals.

The Annecy International Animation Film Festival's 2016 programme lists Saatchi among the production credits of Dear Angelica, directed by Unseld with artistic direction by Wesley Allsbrook. In an October 2016 interview with VentureBeat about Quill, the painting tool that grew out of that film, Saatchi, then a producer at the studio, said: "We were determined that the tool had to be comfortable to use for hours so you could tell more complex stories and art." At Oculus Connect 3 in 2016, Saatchi, Unseld and Planck, described by Road to VR as three of the studio's co-founders, took part in a roundtable with Kent Bye of the Voices of VR podcast, in which Saatchi said VR storytellers often feel the "dead hand of cinema" hanging over their work.

Facebook announced the closure of Oculus Story Studio on 4 May 2017. Cartoon Brew reported that the unit, which it described as headed by Saatchi, had fifty employees and that all of its projects in production were cancelled, including the Wolves in the Walls adaptation.

Fable

Wolves in the Walls

Saatchi and Pete Billington, another member of the Story Studio team, co-founded Fable Studio, which made its public debut in January 2018. AWE speaker biographies give 2017 as the year it was co-founded. The team had kept working on Wolves in the Walls after the closure with further funding from Oculus, and the first chapter premiered at Sundance in January 2018. At launch Saatchi told TechCrunch that he wanted "as much interactivity as makes you connect with Lucy", the girl at the center of the story, rather than mini-game features. He said he aimed to break even in 2018 by making content less expensively, shrinking teams from about 40 people to four or five and relying on "made in VR" production, and that he believed consumers would pay about 1 US dollar for 10 minutes of entertainment. He told UploadVR, "We aren't necessarily thinking of ourselves as a VR movie studio anymore," describing Fable instead as a company working on interactive characters.

Wolves in the Walls: It's All Over won the Outstanding Innovation in Interactive Media award at the 2019 Primetime Emmys. The Television Academy credited Fable Studio, Facebook, Billington (director and creator), Jessica Yaffa Shamash (creative producer and creator) and Saatchi (executive producer). As Lucy and the Wolves in the Walls, for the Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest, it won a 2022 Peabody Award in the Interactive category; the Peabody credits list Saatchi as executive producer of the VR experience and of Lucy's Life.

Virtual beings

In a January 2018 interview with Engadget, Saatchi said he did not see VR movies as the future of storytelling and pointed instead to interactive characters for AR and VR, including a possible AR version of Lucy able to recognize and interact with several people. He described "a writer's room for building one character" as the most interesting area for storytellers, and said Fable had recruited designers who had worked on the characters Elizabeth in BioShock Infinite and Ellie in The Last of Us, with Doug Church as a consultant.

At Sundance in January 2019 he announced that Fable was stepping back from VR experiences to focus on AI-driven virtual beings. "Just seeing the industry, I think VR movies are not the future," he told Engadget. "I think AI is the next art form we need to explore." In July 2019, as Fable's chief executive, he organized the first Virtual Beings Summit in San Francisco, where he announced a grant program. He was a speaker at AWE USA 2019, sharing the session "Building Entertaining AR Experiences for Consumers" with Kirin Sinha of Illumix.

Generative AI and Showrunner

Fable's later work is outside VR. In July 2023 the company presented SHOW-1, a research system that generated television episodes in the style of South Park. Saatchi, as CEO, told GamesBeat that Fable was not releasing Showrunner commercially and was not in talks with "the South Park people", though it was in talks with several studios and creators about original works. He is a co-author of the accompanying paper, "To Infinity and Beyond: SHOW-1 and Showrunner Agents in Multi-Agent Simulations". In May 2024 Fable announced Showrunner, which Saatchi called a "Netflix of AI" for user-generated episodes. The service opened widely on 30 July 2025, the same day Amazon made an undisclosed investment in Fable; TheWrap identified Saatchi as Fable's CEO at that time.

Awards

Year	Award	Work	Credit
2019	Primetime Emmy Award, Outstanding Innovation in Interactive Media (juried)	Wolves in the Walls: It's All Over	Executive producer
2022	Peabody Award, Interactive	Lucy and the Wolves in the Walls	Executive producer

See also

• Oculus Story Studio
• Fable Studio
• Quill
• Cinematic VR