Drone shows have become one of the Olympics’ signature visual moments in less than a decade, moving from a novel experiment to an expected part of how the Games open and close. Looking at how that happened, and where the format is headed next, tells a broader story about how drone technology has matured into a serious production tool for the world’s largest live events.
PyeongChang 2018: The First Winter Olympics Drone Show
The Winter Olympics’ first drone light show took flight at the PyeongChang 2018 Opening Ceremony, where 1,218 Intel Shooting Star drones formed a sequence of animations, including a snowboarder that morphed into the Olympic rings, using onboard LEDs capable of over four billion color combinations. The performance set a Guinness World Records title for the most unmanned aerial vehicles airborne simultaneously, surpassing Intel’s earlier 500-drone record set in Germany in 2016.
The show was notable for more than its scale. It was produced under genuinely difficult conditions, PyeongChang’s sub-zero winter temperatures pushed both the drone hardware and the on-site crew to their limits, with many of the custom animations flying over 300 feet high. A planned drone segment for the opening ceremony itself was ultimately affected by last-minute logistical issues, though a light show did appear during the Games, underscoring just how new and technically demanding this format still was at the time.
Tokyo 2020: Scaling Up and Deepening the Narrative
By the Tokyo 2020 Opening Ceremony, held in 2021, the format had matured significantly. A fleet of 1,824 Intel drones took to the sky following the Parade of Nations, first forming the Tokyo 2020 emblem before transitioning into a giant rotating three-dimensional representation of Earth, accompanied by a performance of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” The sequence was designed in close collaboration between Intel’s drone animators and the Tokyo 2020 creative team, integrating the drone segment directly into the ceremony’s broader narrative about global unity rather than treating it as a standalone spectacle.
Intel’s team has since described both the PyeongChang and Tokyo shows as among the most challenging productions the company has run, given the scale of the global broadcast audience and the technical complexity of choreographing shows of that size for a live international audience.
Beijing 2022: Building on the Format
The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics continued the trend, with roughly 1,800 drones featured in the opening ceremony programming, alongside broader use of drone displays across related events, including the FISU World University Games program held around the same period. By this point, large-scale Olympic drone displays had shifted from a novel first for a single Games to an expected element of how a modern opening ceremony gets produced.
What This Progression Shows
Looking across PyeongChang, Tokyo, and Beijing, a clear pattern emerges. Each Games pushed fleet size modestly higher, but the more significant evolution was in how tightly the drone segments integrated into the ceremony’s actual storytelling. PyeongChang introduced the format at record-setting scale. Tokyo used it to carry a specific emotional and narrative beat tied to the Games’ broader theme. Each iteration treated drones less as a standalone technical demonstration and more as a genuine production tool, woven into music, lighting, and the ceremony’s overall creative direction.
This mirrors a broader trend across the drone show industry generally: growth from something used to intentionally amaze audiences with sheer novelty into a mature creative medium capable of supporting detailed storytelling for events well beyond the Olympic stage.
A Real Example Closer to Home: Salt Lake City 2034
This same evolution is visible outside the Olympics’ own broadcast productions too. When Salt Lake City’s selection as host of the 2034 Winter Olympics was announced, Open Sky Productions produced a drone show as part of the city’s celebration marking the milestone. That show reflects the same underlying shift the Olympic ceremonies themselves have gone through: using coordinated aerial formations to mark a genuinely significant civic and athletic moment, rather than treating the format as a novelty. The recap of the Salt Lake City 2034 Winter Olympics announcement drone show covers what that production looked like in practice.
It’s a useful reminder that the technology driving Olympic-scale ceremonies is the same underlying technology available to cities, universities, and event organizers well outside the Games themselves. The guide on aerial drone shows covers how this technology has been applied across a broader range of event formats beyond the Olympic stage specifically.
What’s Next for Olympic Drone Displays
Looking ahead, a few trends seem likely to continue shaping how drone shows appear at future Games. Fleet sizes will likely keep growing modestly, though the more meaningful advances tend to come from choreography sophistication and tighter integration with music and live performance rather than raw drone count alone. Expect continued emphasis on storytelling that ties directly into each host nation’s cultural identity and each Games’ specific theme, following the pattern Tokyo set with its Earth formation and PyeongChang set with its snowboarder-to-rings sequence.
As more cities and organizations, including Salt Lake City’s own 2034 preparations, gain direct experience with large-scale drone productions ahead of hosting the Games, the format’s role in Olympic ceremonies seems likely to keep deepening rather than leveling off.
Learning More About the Technology
For readers interested in how this technology works at a production level, from choreography design through live execution, the Open Sky Productions Knowledge Hub covers the planning and production process in depth.
To learn more about Open Sky Productions and the shows the team has produced, visit Open Sky Productions.