Roberto Orci, one of the most prolific and successful Hollywood writers and producers in recent memory, died Tuesday from kidney failure. He was 51 years old.
Orci is best known for his work with fellow writer and creator Alex Kurtzman. Together, the pair wrote and produced a slew of massive hits such as Mission: Impossible III, Star Trek, Transformers, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and more. Truly, there was a time when anything the pair touched turned to gold and two of the best words you could hear in Hollywood were “Kurtzman and Orci.”
That relationship ended in 2014 which saw Kurtzman moving on to CBS’s Star Trek shows like Discovery and Picard as well as directing Tom Cruise’s film The Mummy ,while Orci took to the beaches to help bring back Hawaii Five-O for 10 years. But even with their own newer, individual successes, their names will forever be connected.
Orci and his partner basically defined an era when nerdy wasn’t quite that cool yet. When the big IPs were just starting to break into the mainstream in a way that would become a second thought years later. That started in the late 1990s with jobs writing on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess. They then hooked up with Bad Robot and J.J. Abrams on shows like Alias and Fringe before graduating to the big screen with films like 2009’s Star Trek and 2007’s Transformers. Not the crappy sequels either—though they had smaller parts to play in those too—but the really good originals.
For about 10 years or so it was almost like Orci and his friends could do no wrong. They even got a dream team together including Harrison Ford, Daniel Craig, and Jon Favreau to make a sci-fi cowboy film called Cowboys and Aliens. It, unfortunately, didn’t live up to its standards but that was the power of Orci in that time. You expected it to be amazing because everyone involved was amazing.
There were tons of other noteworthy projects along the way, such as the TV remake of Sleepy Hollow, Limitless and his original idea, Matador. And, at only 51, one would imagine there were several more decades of noteworthy projects to come. Orci had a dream career that ended way too soon.
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