Jake Schreier

Jake Schreier is an American film and television director whose feature films include *Robot & Frank*, *Paper Towns*, and Marvel Studios’ *Thunderbolts**. Across those projects, he has worked with three distinct kinds of source material: an original near-future screenplay, a bestselling young-adult novel, and an established superhero franchise. He also directed episodes of the Netflix series *Beef*.

Schreier made his feature directorial debut with *Robot & Frank*, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012. Written by Christopher D. Ford, the film stars Frank Langella as Frank, a former jewel thief whose son gives him a robot caretaker. Frank initially resists the arrangement but discovers that the robot can help him plan another theft. Peter Sarsgaard provides the robot’s voice, while James Marsden and Liv Tyler play Frank’s children. The film won Sundance’s Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize, an award recognizing films that engage with science or technology. Its story uses the robot not just as a futuristic device but as a way to explore Frank’s independence and failing memory.

His next feature, *Paper Towns*, was released in 2015. Adapted from John Green’s novel, it stars Nat Wolff as Quentin Jacobsen and Cara Delevingne as Margo Roth Spiegelman. After Margo draws Quentin into an overnight series of pranks and then disappears, he follows clues he believes she has left behind. The search eventually becomes a road trip with his friends. Unlike the invented near future of *Robot & Frank*, *Paper Towns* places its mystery inside a contemporary coming-of-age story.

Schreier later directed episodes of *Beef*, the 2023 Netflix series created by Lee Sung Jin. Its central conflict begins with a road-rage encounter between Danny Cho, played by Steven Yeun, and Amy Lau, played by Ali Wong. Their attempts to retaliate against each other escalate far beyond that first confrontation. The series received the 2024 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series.

In 2025, Schreier directed *Thunderbolts**, bringing together characters previously introduced across the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Its cast includes Florence Pugh as Yelena Belova, Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes, David Harbour as Alexei Shostakov, Wyatt Russell as John Walker, and Hannah John-Kamen as Ava Starr. Julia Louis-Dreyfus reprises her role as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. The film follows this uneasy group as they are drawn into a dangerous assignment, giving Schreier a much larger ensemble and production scale than those of his first two features.