His Bad Robot banner went from a $250 million Warners deal to scrapping its Santa Monica HQ in just a few years.
’ shingle Bad Robot revealed April 2 that it was shuttering its L.A. office, the news hit the industry like a thunderbolt. But really, the company’s downsizing had been months in the making, foreshadowed by the $31 million sale of its creative office space in Santa Monica in the fall.
“They haven’t had anything of note in a while, and other movies weren’t using the facilities,” a source tells. And it certainly puts a fine point on it that the company couched the move as part of a shift in focus to New York, where Abrams now resides while balancing a bicoastal work schedule. The prolific hitmaker founded Bad Robot in 1999, and it grew along with the star power of the onetime wunderkind, who penned his first hit show in 1998. The company originally was set up at Touchstone TV, but when it moved into the Olympic Boulevard facility, it was maturing into a busy key producer of TV series. With such shows as the seminal, there was always a Bad Robot show or two on air throughout the mid-aughts into the late 2010s. That was coupled with Abrams’ rising career as an A-list feature filmmaker. He helmed twoThe Bad Robot offices became the watermark of a producer’s achievement. Filled with neato toys and props from Abrams’ productions, “It was fun and cool,” recalls one writer who spent time there. “It was meant to be this aspirational and creative space.” When the company was in production, the building swelled with hundreds of employees, including personnel from Kelvin Optical, its in-house visual effects company. One of themovies even did pickups on the roof of the complex, which included two theaters and four dedicated editing suites, as the campus went from one building to two, then three. During the late 2010s, executive ranks in the space grew to include a Bad Robot record label, Loud Robot, and a Bad Robot games division. only lasted a season each. Other shows never got picked up. And Abrams became mired in the protracted, and failed, development of the original sci-fi dramaand for which he had sought a budget north of $200 million. Bad Robot was to have produced some DC features, too, but those were shelved once DC Studios, under James Gunn and Peter Safran, was created. In 2024, Bad Robot’s Warners deal was extended for another two years but became a nonexclusive, first-look pact. Another blow occurred with the departure of Hannah Minghella, Bad Robot’s head of film. She decamped for Netflix in 2024, just as the banner was beginning postproduction on what would become director David Robert Mitchell’shigh-concept dinosaur feature, the upcoming, its first produced film via its Warners pact. Then came another challenge. The movie needed some additional photography involving lead Anne Hathaway,The End of Oak Streetfrom directors Jon M. Chu and Jill Culton. And, sources say, Abrams is actively looking for his next directorial project. Says an insider: “This is a dramatic scaling back. It’s the end of an era.”The Perfect Neighbor Peabody Awards: ‘Mr. Nobody Against Putin,’ ‘Pee-Wee As Himself,’ ‘The Perfect Neighbor’ Among First Set of NomineesThe Girl with the Needle ‘The Girl With the Needle,’ ‘The Ties That Bind Us’ Directors to Pitch New Films to Investors at Cannes Market. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. // This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google
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