When J.J. Abrams’ 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 The Hollywood Reporter. 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. (Steven Spielberg, Abrams’ mentor, decamped to New York earlier this year.)
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 Lost, Fringe, Person of Interest and Westworld, 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 two Star Trek movies and two Star Wars movies — no small feat —while also being involved as a producer on a trio of Mission: Impossible movies and the Cloverfield genre films.
The 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 the Star Wars movies 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.
But, despite a record-setting $250 million deal with WarnerMedia in 2019, the 2020s were not salad days. Lovecraft Country and Duster 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 drama Demimonde, which would have been his first solo creation since Alias and 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 The End of Oak Street, its first produced film via its Warners pact. Then came another challenge. The movie needed some additional photography involving lead Anne Hathaway, THR has learned, but because the actress by then had moved to another production — Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey — post effectively shut down for six months before picking up again. Minghella, meanwhile, was never replaced.
Abrams is focused on The Great Beyond, his first directed movie since 2019’s Rise of Skywalker; it’s due out Nov. 13 from Warners. Bad Robot has The End of Oak Street arriving Aug. 16, and it’s attached to produce the 2028 Dr. Seuss adaptation Oh, the Places You’ll Go! from 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.”