MAY 2019 FASTCOMPANY.COM 45additional scenes for The Force Awakens have
been shot on Bad Robot’s roof, and a bar scene
for Star Trek Into Darkness was filmed in one of
the company’s screening rooms. But this time,
his return has been particularly dramatic. He’s
brought 23 postproduction technicians with
him to help finish “trIXie,” Episode IX’s code
name, in time for the film’s December release.
(Time’s Up, which works out of Bad Robot’s of-
fices, stemming from co-CEO Katie McGrath’s
role in organizing the group, moved across
the street into another Bad Robot building in
order to make room.)
Abrams is also coming back to a new
Hollywood. Disney’s $71.3 billion acquisi-
tion of most of 21st Century Fox is the latest
consolidation as the entertainment industry
seeks to compete against giant tech com-
panies such as Amazon, Apple, and, espe-
cially, Netflix, which are upending the TV
and movie ecosystem. While WarnerMedia
and Comcast restructure themselves as
they prepare to launch streaming services
sometime in the next year, new entertain-
ment mediums keep emerging. Consider
the video game Fortnite, which generated
$2.4 billion in 2018—surpassing The Force
Awakens’ $2.07 billion in global box office.
Fortnite is now hosting concerts for its more
than 200 million players, a nod to how expe-
riences, whether in virtual worlds or theme
parks, represent yet another storytelling op-
portunity. Competition is everywhere.FRESH PRINTS
Abrams bought an
Ohio letterpress
shop even before
Bad Robot moved
into its office.MONSTERS INC.
“I come in and
s c u l p t o n m y o w n
in the art room
because it’s such
a wonderful space,”
says Beastlies
creator Leslie
Levings.CREATIVE TYPES
“For Bad Robot,
our goal here was
to create a place
with a sense of
endless poten-
tial,” says co-CEO
Katie McGrath.Abrams blends in with the other Bad Ro-
bot employees in his dark jeans, black boots,
gray T-shirt, and hoodie. But all eyes are fixed
on him right now, and the room quiets to an
almost deafening silence—this is, after all, a
highly soundproofed space—when he finally
speaks. Abrams, who returned to L.A. a week
ago, is clearly jazzed to be back, and he revels
in sharing details about making Star Wars
on one of the tightest schedules he’s ever
faced, and how it forced him and his team to
problem-solve on the fly the way he did back
when he was making Super 8 movies as a kid.
“I wasn’t supposed to be there,” Abrams
says after the town hall. “I wasn’t the guy, ya
know?” (That was Jurassic World director Colin
Trevorrow, who left the Star Wars project un-
ceremoniously in September 2017.) Abrams
admits that his decision to take over the film
at the request of Lucasfilm president Kathleen
Kennedy was a “leap of faith,” but “this crazy
challenge that could have been a wildly un-
comfortable contortion of ideas and shoving
in of answers and Band-Aids and bridges...
I feel like we’ve gotten to a place—without
jinxing anything—where we might have
something incredibly special.”
Typically, Abrams’s homecoming from a
set means organized chaos at Bad Robot. His
directing work on a project is far from over
after filming wraps, and the company’s cushy
facilities become a convenient base of opera-
tions for further work. Over the past few years,
For Abrams, who has spent years ex-
perimenting beyond TV and film, what
good are all these new interactive platforms
without great stories? He has an unparal-
leled track record in reviving franchise
properties—Mission: Impossible, Star Trek,
and Star Wars—at a moment when media
conglomerates crave titles that inspire fans
to lose themselves within an entire world.
(Harry Potter, for example, is estimated to be
worth $25 billion across its books, movies,
theme parks, merchandise, and so forth.)
Abrams, Bad Robot’s chairman and co-CEO,
is now reconfiguring his company so he
can build—and own—more of his own im-
mersive spheres.
“This entire enterprise has been a re-
sponse to the question, ‘What if?’ ” Abrams
says. “The great stories, the ones I love, all
seem to come from a ‘what if?’ ” The idea is
for Bad Robot’s various divisions to create,
and frequently collaborate on, a wide array
of projects—albums, music videos, films, TV
shows, video games, and even toys—that the
company is significantly invested in over the
long haul, creatively and financially. Bad Ro-
bot Games, which launched last June with an
investment from Chinese tech giant Tencent
(the largest gaming company in the world),
has partnered with Epic Games (maker of
Fortnite), among others, to explore the future
of narrative storytelling. Bad Robot has al-
ways had its own sound studio, inspired by