In June 2019, JJ Abrams signed a huge overall deal that landed him at Warner Bros. his home studio since 2006.
The five-year pact, set at $500 million at the time, had a unique structure that allowed Abrams to tap into a significant pool of money to sign other writers to overall deals. That positioned the multi-hyphenate behind “Felicity” and “Lost” not just as a content creator, but as a mogul whose Bad Robot production company would produce the next generation of storytellers, with Abrams and his wife, Katie McGrath, overseeing the stable. Five and a half years later, Warner Bros. not much to show for all the coin it dropped on Abrams, even as the value of the deal fell by half as Bad Robot failed to reach the financial and output benchmarks that it would. have raised the entire $500 million. With less leverage than in 2019, Abrams’ team has quietly inked a more modest production pact with the studio, which sources say will include film and TV. It’s a signal to agents and managers around town that the era of the nine-figure writer-producer megadeal has reached its zenith. (Bad Robot and Warner Bros. declined comment.)
If the plan was to make Abrams a cross between Bob Iger and Rembrandt, it didn’t quite work out. Bad Robot spent about $50 million of Warners’ money making satellite deals with writer-producers like Angela Robinson, Dustin Thomason, Jessie Nelson and LaToya Morgan, which yielded little. The goal was to turn Bad Robot into a mini-studio with autonomy within Warners.
“The CEO thing smelled,” says one top dealmaker. “But this was the heyday of the deal.”
In 2022, HBO Max put the brakes on Robinson’s “Madame X” series, which was based on the immortal DC character. Last year, the streamer opted not to move forward with Thomason’s “Overlook,” a spinoff of Stephen King’s “The Shining.” Nelson’s ‘Little Voice’, a music-rich ode to the boredom of twenty-somethings, produced by Warner Bros. TV and released by Apple TV+, it lasted one season before being canceled in 2021. And Morgan’s ‘Duster’ has had a long journey behind the screen. The FBI drama was immediately greenlit on HBO Max in 2020 and will eventually debut on Max in 2025. Sources say Morgan was paid more than $10 million for eight episodes.
“The pressure is on and the economy is really putting a new spotlight on extravagance,” said Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. “This is now a meat-and-potatoes economy. It was always a luxury company, and now everyone is feeling the pressure. You look at the layoffs, the collapse of some of these big companies, the debt loads that they’ve taken on. We are not in a recession, but we are in a recession economy.”
With his new deal, Abrams is no longer at the top of the shrinking ranks of writer-producers with nine-figure deals. Agents familiar with the Hollywood pecking order say Dick Wolf is king, thanks to the sheer tonnage of his “Law & Order,” “FBI” and “Chicago” franchises at NBC and CBS. He is followed by Ryan Murphy (Disney, “American Horror Story”), Shonda Rhimes (Netflix, “Bridgerton”), Dan Fogelman (Disney, “Only Murders in the Building”), Taylor Sheridan (Paramount, “Yellowstone”) and Greg Berlanti (Warner Bros., “The Flash”). Berlanti still has two years left on his $120 million pact and will likely face a still-inhospitable climate when it comes time to negotiate. Some, like comedy kingpin Chuck Lorre, have more complicated deals that can eclipse those of the mega-earners because of back-end compensation terms for high-performing shows.
If volume is key for the writer-producer, the once prolific Abrams ran into trouble at exactly the wrong time. On the TV front, HBO Max canceled Bad Robot’s series “Constantine,” based on the DC property. On the big screen, there was a lot of hype surrounding an Abrams-produced Black Superman movie with a script by Ta-Nehisi Coates. That project is technically still alive, but hasn’t seen any progress since early 2023. Instead, Warner Bros.-DC will release the James Gunn-directed ‘Superman’ reboot in theaters on July 11. Abrams did produce the upcoming 80s set ‘Flowervale Street’ starring Anne Hathaway. While the $85 million thriller, out March 13, may feature dinosaurs, it’s not the kind of tentpole WarnerMedia had in mind in 2019.
Even if Abrams’ production had done better, he would still be at the mercy of the market. COVID and the twin labor strikes of 2023 wreaked havoc on the industry, halting or halting productions and decimating profits for older studios. More than a year after SAG-AFTRA reached an agreement with the studios, production has still not returned to normal. That has CEOs including David Zaslav of Warner Bros. Discovery, sent in search of cartilage to trim.
“The focus on downsizing at studios means we need to reexamine these generous talent deals,” said Jason Squire, professor emeritus at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and host of “The Movie Business Podcast.” “Warner Bros. Discovery – and other studios too – are under intense pressure from shareholders and the board to reduce their debt and talent [costs] is one way to do it.”
But if there was one unmistakable sign that a new day was dawning, it was HBO pulling the plug on Abrams’ $200 million-plus series “Demimonde” in 2022 due to budget concerns. It was produced by Warner Bros. Television produced science fiction drama was then sold to the streamers with deep pockets. There were no takers.
A veteran producer says: “The Bad Robot deal was a huge coronation for JJ. He was actually a working screenwriter helped by Hollywood [turn] in the next Steven Spielberg. But the question is: what does Warner Bros. taken out of that deal?’