Joshua Wexler wants you inside the story

Joshua Wexler gave a LEGO adventurer a name borrowed from the thing that makes the bricks useful: their grip on one another. Clutch Powers sounds like someone equipped to escape a collapsing temple. It also describes a connection. For a producer whose work keeps crossing from films into rides, games and places people can enter, that is a fitting little piece of vocabulary.

Wexler is the co-founder and CEO of Pure Imagination Studios. He prefers the title Chief Executive of Fun. It has the advantage of telling you what the customer ought to get, which is more than can be said for many executive titles. The work beneath it involves artists, engineers, characters, clients and the problem of making all those people and parts cooperate.

His career has taken him through the Threshold Entertainment group, the creation of a LEGO hero and an executive-producer credit on Piece by Piece, the animated documentary about Pharrell Williams. More recently, it has brought him into conversations about students and jobs in Salina, Kansas. The destinations change. He keeps finding reasons to give someone a part in the action.

A hero with a grip

The LEGO interest began in childhood. By 2011, Wexler was happily describing himself as a geek dad and discussing the character he had invented with the sort of specificity that distinguishes an enthusiast from someone merely doing publicity. Clutch Powers took inspiration from Superman, Star Wars, Monty Python, Aliens and Indiana Jones. That is quite a committee to fit inside a plastic head.

He wanted LEGO to have a hero of its own. He pitched the character to the company, which accepted the idea. LEGO: The Adventures of Clutch Powers arrived in 2010. Even the supporting names offered something for fellow fans: Arthur Fol was a nod to AFOL, the abbreviation for Adult Fan of LEGO.

Such details give a character two audiences. A child gets an adventure. An adult who knows the language gets the pleasure of recognition. The joke does not need to stop the story and announce its cleverness. It can sit quietly in a name until somebody notices.

There was already a path beyond the film. A Clutch Powers 4D attraction brought the character into the theme park setting. A creation could be watched at home and encountered on an outing. Wexler was working with the same basic invitation in different rooms.

An education in other people’s worlds

His formal training was in Film and Children’s Television at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he earned a B.A. Before Pure Imagination, he was co-founder and president of Threshold Entertainment Group. Its businesses included Threshold Entertainment, Threshold Animation Studios and Blackbelt TV. His experience joined production with the job of running an entertainment business.

Mortal Kombat was part of that earlier career. Wexler shared the story credit on Mortal Kombat Annihilation, released in 1997. The worlds he worked around were often familiar before his involvement. Their characters already had fans, histories and expectations. Making another installment meant entering a conversation that had started elsewhere.

That background helps explain the range of his later work. A familiar character can travel, but each new format has its own demands. A film controls what appears next. An attraction has to handle the visitor who looks in the wrong direction, the family experiencing it together and the awkward fact that everyone eventually needs to get off the ride.

For Wexler, production has repeatedly meant finding a workable relationship between a recognizable fictional world and the particular experience being made. A good character opens the door. There is still a great deal of work on the other side of it.

Please remain involved

Pure Imagination was founded in Los Angeles in 2012. Its founding plan brought multiple forms of content into one company and put real-time production tools near the center of the work. Animation, interactive experiences and physical attractions could share creative and technical capabilities. Wexler’s new studio gave those neighboring disciplines a common address.

“Our strength lies in our people.”

Joshua Wexler

The distinction between watching and doing becomes literal in Justice League: Battle for Metropolis. Pure Imagination supplied real-time gameplay for an interactive dark ride made with Sally and other collaborators. Visitors carry laser blasters and help rescue kidnapped superheroes. The ride uses motion vehicles, wide screens and other effects, but the visitor’s assignment is admirably straightforward: help.

Giving the audience a task changes the writing problem. A passenger needs a reason to care about the next room and enough information to act. The machinery has to support that moment. Nobody boards a superhero ride hoping to spend the next few minutes admiring a software pipeline.

The company’s Army of the Dead experience offered another assignment, aboard an armored taco truck in a zombie-infested Las Vegas. Up to six players joined a rescue mission using VR headsets and motion platforms. The project launched in Los Angeles and Jersey City before opening in Las Vegas with Netflix.

A taco truck is an excellent reminder that immersive storytelling can afford a sense of humor about its own apparatus. It gives the group a place, a shared predicament and an excuse to move through the fiction together. The participants have something to do beyond looking impressed.

A musician, rebuilt in bricks

In 2024, the LEGO connection returned in a different form. Piece by Piece, directed by Morgan Neville, tells Pharrell Williams’s life through LEGO animation. Wexler is credited as an executive producer. Pure Imagination shares the animation credit with Tongal and Zebu Animation Studios. The familiar bricks became the visual language for an actual person’s memories, music and working life.

For the creator of Clutch Powers, it was a striking change in what LEGO could be asked to carry. An invented adventurer and a documentary subject require different kinds of attention. One invites the audience into a new fiction; the other uses an artificial world to give shape to someone’s account of experience.

Wexler celebrated the film’s premiere publicly, naming Neville, animation director Howard Baker and the partner studios. His enthusiasm was directed toward the people who had made it with him. An executive-producer credit can look solitary when extracted from a long list. His description put it back among the collaborators.

The production also used Unreal Engine in its animation work. Its technical process sits within Wexler’s longer interest in real-time tools across entertainment formats. Yet the film offers a useful test of all that engineering: can the audience follow a musician’s life and feel the music taking shape? A pipeline earns its place by helping those moments reach the screen.

The next world has a Kansas address

Wexler’s next setting has fewer superheroes. In August 2023, Kansas State University Salina, Pure Imagination Studios, the Salina Airport Authority and the state of Kansas announced a $41 million spatial-computing studio and learning-center project. The proposed K-AIRES facility would house Pure Imagination Labs and connect a working company with a university campus.

Spatial computing can sound like an expression invented to keep a meeting going. Here it has a concrete meaning: digital experiences connected to physical space, including augmented, mixed and virtual reality. The partnership’s ambitions extend into aerospace, manufacturing, simulation and training. The same broad ability to construct a convincing environment can have uses beyond entertainment.

Groundbreaking followed in August 2024. Pure Imagination would be the first corporate partner to colocate on the Salina campus. The university described a place where students could gain experience through immersive environments and industry projects. For someone approaching a creative career, that proximity matters: the work and the people doing it become easier to encounter.

By March 2026, Wexler was speaking at the Salina Community Economic Development Organization’s annual meeting, and the facility was under construction. Pure Imagination Labs was preparing to move from Los Angeles to Salina; Pure Imagination Studios would remain based in Los Angeles. The distinction gives his Kansas ambition a specific shape within the larger company.

The projected employment and educational benefits remain part of the project’s promise. What is already visible is Wexler’s involvement in the place: the partnership announcement, the groundbreaking and the conversations with local organizations. He is asking a community to see digital production as work that could happen there.

Making room for the next participant

That involvement has included public advocacy. In written testimony dated January 31, 2025, Wexler supported Kansas legislation aimed at film and digital-media industry development. He argued for workforce development and economic opportunity, explaining the studio’s decision to invest alongside K-State. The pitch connected entertainment technology with the prospect of careers in the state.

He also delivered K-State Salina’s spring 2024 commencement address and appeared on the program for an October 2025 university symposium panel about K-AIRES. These are different audiences from the people buying a film ticket. Students and educators have their own questions about what the tools make possible and where learning might lead.

Meanwhile, the entertainment work continues. In September 2026, Wexler publicly celebrated projects including Phantom Theater: Opening Nightmare at Kings Island, a MonsterVerse attraction at Lotte World, JUMANJI Safari Tours 4D and an immersive exhibition aboard USS Iowa. His message named partners and described the studio team’s contribution across these settings.

The career now contains both the immediate pleasure of an attraction and the longer prospect of helping someone enter the field that makes it. Wexler’s job title leaves room for both. Fun can be the result an audience takes home, and it can be the reason a student first becomes curious about the work.

Clutch Powers began with a small, exact observation about how things hold together. Years later, Wexler is still working on connections: between a character and a visitor, an artist and an engineer, a university and a studio. The next person to walk through the door might come looking for an adventure. They might also find a way to help build one.