SimonSimon Kinberg grew up in what he calls the “golden age of science fiction,” when Star Wars, Terminator, Alien, and Blade Runner weren’t cross-media IP, but banger movies you got to watch on big screens. For Kinberg, growing up in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Westwood Village in the late 1970s and ’80s put him in skateboarding distance of a movie theater paying Return of the Jedi on constant rotation. He found himself waiting in line with hordes of people hungry to see again and again. His people.

“Maybe the equivalent is a new season of Game of Thrones or a new season of Stranger Things, but even then you’re not having to wait with strangers out in the heat or people who have camped out to see these. And so there was a real magic to science fiction for so many of us who lived lives that are normal or mundane, that idea of entering into a hole of the universe and escaping our world.”