Why J.J. Abrams Is Downsizing - His Bad Robot banner went from a $250 million Warners deal to scrapping its Santa Monica HQ in just a few years

>**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. >**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.**