Jon M. Chu

Jon M. Chu
Born	Jonathan Murray Chu 11/2/1979
Birthplace	Palo Alto, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation	Film director, producer
Known for	Crazy Rich Asians, Wicked
Education	University of Southern California (BFA)
Children	5
Awards	National Board of Review Award for Best Director, Critics' Choice Award for Best Director

Jonathan Murray Chu (born November 2, 1979), known professionally as Jon M. Chu, is an American film director and producer. He came to wide public attention with the 2018 romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians, one of the first films released by a major Hollywood studio in more than two decades to feature a majority cast of Asian descent. Chu's later work has included the film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical In the Heights (2021) and the two-part screen adaptation of the stage musical Wicked, released as Wicked (2024) and Wicked: For Good (2025). For directing Wicked, he received the National Board of Review Award for Best Director and the Critics' Choice Award for Best Director.

Raised in the Silicon Valley town of Los Altos, California, where his family ran the long-established restaurant Chef Chu's, Chu graduated from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts and began his Hollywood career directing dance films, including Step Up 2: The Streets (2008) and Step Up 3D (2010). He has since worked in a range of genres, encompassing concert documentaries about Justin Bieber, the action sequel G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013), and big-budget musicals. In December 2025, Chu signed a three-year first-look producing deal with Paramount Pictures and Paramount Television Studios.

Early Life

Chu was born on November 2, 1979, in Palo Alto, California, and raised in nearby Los Altos. He is the youngest of five children of Lawrence Chu, a chef and restaurateur who emigrated from China, and Ruth Chu. In 1970, Lawrence Chu founded Chef Chu's, a Chinese restaurant in Los Altos that became a fixture of the Silicon Valley dining scene and a meeting place for technology executives and local families.

Chu has described the family restaurant as formative to his sensibility as a filmmaker, in part because of the steady stream of guests, celebrations, and cross-cultural encounters that passed through it during his childhood. The restaurant's clientele, which included business figures from the surrounding technology industry as well as members of the Bay Area's Chinese American community, exposed Chu to the kind of milieu he would later draw on in depicting wealth, family, and identity in his films.

As a child, Chu showed an early interest in performance, magic tricks, and home filmmaking. He attended Pinewood School, a private school in Los Altos Hills, where his early audiovisual work was supported by family members and teachers. In later interviews, Chu has discussed how growing up as a Chinese American in a predominantly white community contributed to a period of uncertainty about his place in the entertainment industry, an uncertainty he has said persisted into his early professional career.

Education

Chu attended the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, graduating in 2003. While at USC, he produced student films that drew industry attention, including the musical short When the Kids Are Away, which won a Student Academy Award and helped attract early representation in Hollywood. His student work foregrounded dance, music, and theatrical staging—elements that would become central to his later feature career.

Career

Early career and dance films (2003–2010)

After leaving USC, Chu was signed to develop projects in Hollywood on the strength of his student work, but several of his early studio assignments stalled in development. He has described this period as a difficult one professionally, during which he doubted whether he belonged in the film industry. His feature directorial debut came with Step Up 2: The Streets (2008), the second film in the Step Up dance franchise, which Disney and Touchstone Pictures had developed following the success of the 2006 original. The New York Times profiled Chu in connection with the release, noting that his blend of music-video aesthetics, theatrical staging, and choreography distinguished his approach within the genre.

Chu followed Step Up 2 with Step Up 3D (2010), an early Hollywood feature shot natively in stereoscopic 3D. The film extended the franchise into a new format and helped establish Chu as a director comfortable with technically ambitious dance and music sequences. During and after this period, Chu also cultivated a presence in online dance culture, producing web series and dance-crew showcases that ran parallel to his studio work.

Concert films and G.I. Joe (2011–2015)

Chu directed Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (2011), a concert documentary about the singer Justin Bieber. The film performed strongly at the box office and was followed by Justin Bieber's Believe (2013), a second documentary chronicling Bieber's later tour. Both films combined live performance footage with behind-the-scenes biographical material.

In 2013, Chu directed G.I. Joe: Retaliation, the sequel to the 2009 action film based on the Hasbro toy line. The film marked Chu's first major foray into large-scale action filmmaking and starred Dwayne Johnson, Bruce Willis, and Channing Tatum. He subsequently directed Jem and the Holograms (2015), a contemporary live-action adaptation of the 1980s animated television series, which underperformed at the box office. Chu has cited the reception of Jem as a turning point that prompted him to reconsider the kinds of stories he wanted to tell.

Crazy Rich Asians and breakthrough (2016–2019)

Chu next directed Crazy Rich Asians (2018), an adaptation of Kevin Kwan's 2013 novel of the same name, produced and distributed by Warner Bros. The film starred Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Michelle Yeoh, and Awkwafina, and depicted a Chinese American academic who travels to Singapore to meet her boyfriend's wealthy family. It was the first contemporary Hollywood studio film with a majority Asian cast since The Joy Luck Club in 1993. Chu has spoken in interviews about deliberately choosing the project over higher-paying offers because of its cultural significance and its proximity to his own family background.

Crazy Rich Asians opened at number one at the North American box office with a debut of approximately $35 million over its first weekend, exceeding industry expectations, and went on to gross more than $238 million worldwide. The film's reception prompted Warner Bros. to greenlight a sequel based on Kwan's follow-up novel China Rich Girlfriend, with Chu attached to direct.

In the Heights and Wicked (2020–2025)

Chu directed In the Heights (2021), the film adaptation of the 2008 Broadway musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes, starring Anthony Ramos. The production reinforced Chu's identification with the screen musical and led to further work in that genre.

Universal Pictures subsequently engaged Chu to direct its long-developed film adaptation of the stage musical Wicked, based on the Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman show and Gregory Maguire's novel. The project was expanded into two feature films, Wicked (2024) and Wicked: For Good (2025), starring Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda. Chu has discussed the central creative challenge of the films as balancing the perspectives of the two leads, telling Gold Derby that "all people want is for them to be together."

Wicked was a major commercial release and brought Chu his most prominent critical recognition to date, including the National Board of Review Award for Best Director and the Critics' Choice Award for Best Director. Wicked: For Good followed in November 2025 and received a more mixed critical response; the publication JoySauce described the second installment as exposing the limitations of the stage source material.

Producing and Paramount deal (2025–present)

In December 2025, The Hollywood Reporter reported that Chu had signed a three-year first-look producing deal with Paramount Pictures and Paramount Television Studios, covering both feature film and television development through his production company. The deal followed the global release of the Wicked films and signaled a continued expansion of Chu's work as a producer alongside his directing.

Chu has also become a public speaker on creative practice. In April 2026, he delivered a keynote at the Canva Create conference, telling an audience of design professionals that "creativity is hard" and urging them to "dream bigger than you ever think you could." In interviews around the same time, he has emphasized the role of unscripted moments in filmmaking, describing "play" as central to what he considers cinematic magic.

Personal Life

Chu is married to Kristin Hodge, a former dancer. The couple have five children. The family has resided in the Los Angeles area, where Chu is based for his work. He has frequently discussed in interviews the influence of his family of origin on his career, including the example set by his father, Lawrence Chu, in running Chef Chu's in Los Altos for more than five decades.

Chu has spoken publicly about experiencing what he has called imposter syndrome through much of his early career, saying in 2026 interviews tied to a memoir-related press cycle that for years he did not believe he "deserved to be in Hollywood" and characterizing his early opportunities as a matter of being "very lucky." He has also discussed the role of his Chinese American identity in shaping which projects he chose to pursue after a period of professional setbacks in the mid-2010s.

Recognition

For his direction of Wicked (2024), Chu received the National Board of Review Award for Best Director and the Critics' Choice Award for Best Director. The film, alongside its sequel Wicked: For Good (2025), positioned him among the more prominent directors of large-scale film musicals working in Hollywood in the mid-2020s.

Earlier in his career, Chu's student film When the Kids Are Away won a Student Academy Award while he was at USC, helping initiate his transition to professional directing. His commercial breakthrough with Crazy Rich Asians was treated by industry observers as a watershed in Hollywood representation, with the film's opening-weekend performance reported as a significant data point in arguments for greater on-screen diversity at major studios.

Chu has been profiled by The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and other outlets, and he has been a featured speaker at industry and design events including KQED Live and Canva Create. The USC Alumni Association has highlighted him as a notable graduate of the School of Cinematic Arts.

Legacy

Although Chu's career remains active, commentary surrounding Crazy Rich Asians has consistently treated the film as a marker in the history of Asian American representation in mainstream American cinema. Industry coverage at the time of its release noted that the film's all-Asian cast was the first in a major Hollywood studio film of its scale in 25 years, and its strong opening was reported as evidence that audiences would support such projects commercially. Chu has linked the film directly to his own family history in interviews, framing it as a project that allowed him to bring his Chinese American background into the center of a wide-release Hollywood production rather than the margins.

His work on the Wicked films has further established him within the tradition of Hollywood musical filmmaking. By bringing one of the most commercially successful Broadway musicals of the early 21st century to the screen as a two-part feature event, Chu and his collaborators contributed to a broader revival of the studio musical in the 2020s, alongside other large-scale productions in the genre. His receipt of best director awards from the National Board of Review and the Critics' Choice Awards placed him among the directors most recognized by U.S. critics in the 2024 awards cycle.

Chu has also become a recurring voice in public conversations about creativity, identity, and the experience of working in Hollywood as a person of color. In 2026, he discussed his earlier doubts about belonging in the industry as part of a wider discussion about imposter syndrome, framing his career arc from stalled early projects through Crazy Rich Asians and Wicked as a story of perseverance and reframed self-assessment. His December 2025 first-look deal with Paramount, which encompasses both film and television development, signaled a turn toward a more sustained producing role alongside continued directing work.