About Box Monkey Pictures™
Box Monkey Pictures™ is a multimedia company helmed by comic book legend Bob Layton and entrepreneur Michele Grant. We are dedicated to producing creative, fun, and thought-provoking works based primarily on Bob’s existing properties and concepts created exclusively for us.
Box Monkey’s founders are dedicated to giving back to community and, as such, have pledged a percentage of the profit from each of our projects to the Tower Research Cancer Foundation. Based in Los Angeles California, Tower provides grants to those on the cutting edge of cancer research as well as free exercise classes and rehabilitation programs for people recently diagnosed with, undergoing treatment for, living with and surviving cancer.
Bob Layton
Chief Creative Officer
Bob Layton is an American comics writer, artist, designer and editor; with over 6,400 comic books credited to his name – a creative yardstick rivaled only by the late Stan Lee.
Most noted for his work on Marvel Comics titles such as Iron Man and Ant-Man, and for co-founding Valiant Comics. Bob’s overhaul and relaunch of “Iron Man” in the 1970s moved that character from the cancellation list to one of Marvel’s most popular franchises to this day. The successful Iron Man movies of the last decade is largely based on Bob’s work.
Bob also launched the comic series “X-Factor” for Marvel in 1985, which broke the Marvel Comics’ all-time sales record for a single comic. Bob was the co-creator of the new Ant-Man franchise and many of the characters appearing in the hit Marvel films “Ant-Man” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp”. Bob, along with DC’s former President Paul Levitz, created The Huntress, who appeared in Warner Brothers film “Birds of Prey”.
Bob was co-architect of the original Valiant Comics Universe and served as that company’s Vice President and Editor-In-Chief. Under Layton’s creative management, Valiant went from a two million dollar, venture capital start-up to eventually becoming the third-largest comic publisher in North America in 1993. Valiant Comics and Sony Pictures released “Bloodshot” in 2020, starring Vin Diesel, and Valiant is currently creating content based on more of Bob’s original creations.
Bob has creative credits in ten Marvel Studios films, as well as a host of other television and movie acknowledgments, and has worked with such luminaries as Academy Award Nominees Edward James Olmos and Robert Downey Jr., Jon Favreau, Howard Stern, Scott Winant, David Nutter and the late George A. Romero. Without a doubt, Bob has earned every part of the title given to him by his peers as “one of the industry’s true visionaries”.
Michele Grant
Chief Operating Officer
Michele Grant began working in films, television and commercials in the early 1990s. She is known for her work on “Philadelphia” (1993), “Most Wanted” (1997), and “Polish Wedding” (1998) among many others. She left the film industry in 1997 after an accident on set curtailed her career; but film production and good storytelling remained close to her heart. She began to pursue a career in the food industry – particularly cooking for film productions and working with people with special dietary issues.
In 2009, she received critical acclaim when she founded The Grilled Cheese Truck in the Los Angeles area, pioneering the beginning of what would eventually become the gourmet food truck craze. Under her leadership as C.E.O., The Grilled Cheese Truck showed a profit within three months and was netting triple digits within two and a half years. “Grilled Cheese” became a worldwide and media sensation, with hundreds of thousands of social media followers throughout the world.
Now, in joining Box Monkey as its C.O.O. and C.F.O., Michele returns to her first love of bringing well-crafted stories to the screen.
