Franchises hire Josh Friedman to hold their stories together, and the films he writes for them hold together and say one thing several times. His own series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, is where his idea about family had the hours it needed.
Fi1m perspective
In Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024), a dead leader's words are quoted by whoever wants power next, and the script says so three times. In The Fantastic 4: First Steps (2025), everyone gets a speech about family, and then another one. Josh Friedman's scripts tend to have one good idea, and they tend to worry we have missed it. That is the habit, and it is worth knowing before the rest, because the idea is not a small one and it did not start with the franchises.
He began with a story credit on Chain Reaction (1996) and made his name adapting other people's books: War of the Worlds (2005) for Steven Spielberg, and The Black Dahlia (2006) from James Ellroy, first developed with David Fincher. Then he created Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008–09), which ran two seasons. Since then he has mostly been the writer large properties send for: Terminator: Dark Fate (2019), Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), Kingdom, Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025) and First Steps, twice alongside James Cameron and twice alongside Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. In television he developed Snowpiercer, Emerald City and Foundation.
The Chronicles is the case for him. Friedman saw that protecting a child leaves a great many hours between emergencies, and that Sarah Connor has to be a mother in those hours whatever the machines are doing. Lena Headey plays her troubled and protective, and Summer Glau's Cameron stays interesting even when the plotting does not. We had not expected to care about who was making breakfast in a programme about killer robots, and we did, because Friedman kept putting the breakfast on screen. The writing, with John Enbom and Toni Graphia, is witty as well as dangerous. It is also busy, and a promising stretch too often has to make room for something from a different programme.
The films show less of him, and he has said why: screenwriting pays well, "but in terms of creativity, you're being rewritten and having your work changed by actors and directors and studio notes." On Fire and Ash his credit is for story, and the film goes somewhere new only in its scenery. On Kingdom the middle hour is a walk with conversations. On First Steps the best thing is four people who behave as if they have shared a bathroom for years, and the worst is a city, a device and a countdown we had seen before; four writers share that script. The family idea is in all of them, stated more than once.
If you want to know what he can do, watch the Chronicles and put up with the plotting. If you want to know what he is doing now, any of the films will tell you, and so will the next one. The best thing he has written is the one he also ran.
Biography
Josh Friedman is an American screenwriter and television producer born on 14 February 1967.
He wrote the screenplay for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024). He contributed to the story for Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025) and the screenplay for The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025). Earlier credits include the story for War of the Worlds (2005), the screenplay for The Black Dahlia (2006), and the story for Terminator: Dark Fate (2019). He also worked on the Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) story and created or developed television series including Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Foundation.
