Jake Kasdan

Jacob Kasdan was born to Meg (née Goldman), a writer and Lawrence Kasdan, a writer and director in Detroit. Jacob grew up in a Jewish family with little religious education. His younger brother, Jon Kasdan, also works in the film and television industry as an actor and writer.Jake Kasdan has directed seven films: Zero Effect (1998), Orange County (2002), The TV Set (2006), Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007), Bad Teacher (2011), Sex Tape (2014), Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017), and Jumanji: The Next Level (2019). He has also worked in television, most notably with Judd Apatow as a consulting producer and director on Freaks and Geeks and as a director on Undeclared. He has directed numerous stage productions. He is attached to direct a family film adaption of a John Grisham novel, Calico Joe.

In 2008, Kasdan received his first Golden Globe nomination for Walk Hard in the Best Original Song category (shared with John C. Reilly, Apatow, and Marshall Crenshaw), but lost to "Guaranteed" from Into the Wild (written by Eddie Vedder). As a child, Kasdan made appearances in his father's movies such as The Big Chill and Silverado (in the former he is an autograph seeker at a funeral and in the latter a stable boy).

After the success of New Girl, Kasdan announced that on July 11, 2012, he had signed a deal with 20th Century Fox Television, through The Detective Agency to pursue his own projects. In February 2015, Fox announced that it had greenlit a pilot for the comedy The Grinder to be directed by Kasdan and starring Rob Lowe. On March 26, 2019, The Detective Agency's producing partners Kasdan and Melvin Mar reupped, and signed a new overall deal at 20th Century Fox Television.

In October 2021, it was announced that Disney+ had given a series order to a television adaptation of the graphic novel American Born Chinese. It will be produced by 20th Century Fox Television with Kelvin Yu and Charles Yu as writers and executive producers, Marvin Mar and Kasdan as executive producers, and Destin Daniel Cretton as director and executive producer. Most recently, he served as executive producer of the workplace comedy pilot XYZ at ABC.