Ryan Landels

Ryan Landels is a Canadian-born writer and director for film, television and new media. As a student studying cinema at USC on a scholarship from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, he directed The Midnight Express (2002) - a modern-day fairy tale that won the Audience Award the Slamdance Film Festival and was featured in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Ryan's career began in development with filmmaker Stephen Sommers before shifting his focus to writing and directing. Heading commercial campaigns for clients including Disney, Bravo and Ubisoft, he then collaborated with Jon M. Chu - writing and directing on three seasons of Paramount's The LXD: The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers (2010). The short-form online series, distributed by Hulu, was described by AdAge as "by a wide margin, the most beautifully filmed, elaborately staged web series in the history of the medium." Ryan went on to write and direct Game On (2011), a family-friendly short film that Paramount Pictures released theatrically with Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (2011). In 2015, Ryan wrote the screenplay for Jem and the Holograms (2015) - the live-action adaptation of Hasbro's toy line and animated series. Starring Academy Award nominee Juliette Lewis and Molly Ringwald, the film was given a worldwide theatrical release by Universal Pictures. The following year, he was commissioned by Disney Channel to write, direct and produce Abby Normal (2016) - a short film that follows two teen girls on a supernatural adventure through the suburbs. He followed this project writing Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands: War Within the Cartel (2017), which he also produced with Roberto Orci and Orlando Jones. The film was released by Amazon Studios in 2017. Ryan is based out of Los Angeles and is, to the best of his knowledge, the only writer and director with a G.I. Joe action figure based on his likeness.