From Xandar to NEOM: Olivier Pron's Concept Art Crosses Over

Olivier Pron has spent more than 25 years building worlds for the screen, and now his designs are crossing into real urban development. The concept artist and art director, whose credits include Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Strange, Avengers: Infinity War, Jupiter Ascending and Mad Max: Fury Road, contributed the Hidden Marina concept for The Line to Saudi Arabia's NEOM development — a design presented at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.

That crossover is the story here. A career spent imagining impossible places for Hollywood has produced work credible enough to enter the vocabulary of experimental architecture (design that tests building and urban-planning ideas beyond commercial convention).

What kind of worlds does Pron build?

His science fiction environments sit, in the words of the original feature, "somewhere between an ancient civilization and a distant technological future." They're filled with towering alien structures, labyrinthine cities, vast mechanical installations and architecture that appears to operate according to entirely different laws of physics. As the piece puts it, looking at these images, it's easy to forget that none of these places actually exist.

The scale is part of the point. The feature notes that Pron's worlds seem far too enormous to have been imagined by a single person. They read as the product of whole civilisations rather than one studio desk.

His Marvel work made that reputation concrete. Pron helped shape the futuristic city of Xandar in Guardians of the Galaxy, the devastated world of Titan in Avengers: Infinity War, and several of the mind-bending environments of Marvel's cinematic universe.

Why does the detail matter?

The feature singles out one quality as what makes Pron's art particularly impressive: sheer attention to architectural detail. Even the most outrageous structures feel as though they could have been built by a civilisation with its own history, technology and engineering.

That's the mechanism behind the work's believability. Concept art (the pre-production design discipline that establishes the look of films before they're shot or rendered) succeeds when a viewer stops asking whether a place is real and starts asking how it was built. Pron's drawings pass that test by implying infrastructure, wear and engineering logic behind every tower.

What does this change for architecture and film?

The NEOM commission shows the pipeline running in both directions. Skills developed for fictional world-building — designing cities with coherent histories and technologies — are now being applied to The Line, Saudi Arabia's ambitious linear-city project, where the Hidden Marina concept debuted in Venice in 2023.

The feature adds a necessary caveat: whether such futuristic visions can actually become reality remains another question entirely. NEOM's own construction timeline has been a subject of sustained public scrutiny.

For now, the work is most visible on Pron's Instagram account, where the full archive of megastructures and future cities is published. Whether the next chapter unfolds on screen, in print or in the Saudi desert, Pron's career is evidence that the line between speculative fiction and urban planning has thinned considerably.