I noticed something was off this week when a couple of events that were supposed to take place at ACX1 Studios quietly shifted dates and moved to different venues.
It turns out there was a good reason for that.
ACX1 Studios, the entertainment and film production company that set up shop at the Playground Pier at Caesars back in 2023, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. According to its Google listing, the company is now showing as “closed permanently.”
What makes this particularly surprising is the timing.
New Jersey’s film industry is genuinely booming right now. Filming in the state was up 75% year-over-year in Q4 of 2025, with production spend growing 12%.
Netflix is pouring $1 billion into a new East Coast base at the former Fort Monmouth site. Paramount has locked in a 10-year lease at the in-construction 1888 Studios in Bayonne, and Lionsgate is set as the anchor tenant at Great Point Studios in Newark.
The state is having a genuine moment, which is exactly what makes ACX1’s collapse feel so jarring.
The filing came on March 13, 2026, with the case moving through the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey. Court records show the company is classified under Subchapter V, with both estimated assets and liabilities landing somewhere in the $1 million to $10 million range.
When ACX1 first arrived on the boardwalk, the buzz was real. Co-founder Chris Aponte told CBS3 that the goal was to make Atlantic City the “East Coast hub of Hollywood.”
The pitch was bold. Inside 550,000 square feet of pier space over the Atlantic Ocean, they planned to pack in 150 production sets, a music incubator, recording and rehearsal studios, a comedy club, a brewery, and a bar-cade. On paper, it sounded like nothing else on the East Coast.
The state’s generous tax incentive structure should have worked in their favor. New Jersey offers a 30% base film tax credit, bumped to 35% for productions working with vendors in South Jersey counties like Atlantic County.
By most accounts, though, the project fell well short of its ambitions.
The pier itself has had a long and complicated history. It opened as the upscale Pier Shops at Caesars in 2006, rebranded as Playground Pier in 2015, and had already shed most of its retail tenants before ACX1 took over. By 2019, the building had dwindled to just 10 active tenants, a textbook case of what retail watchers call a “dead mall.”
ACX1 had a compelling pitch for breathing life back into it, but the execution clearly didn’t match the vision.
Atlantic City Mayor Marty Small Sr. had championed ACX1’s arrival as a sign of economic diversification for a city that leans heavily on tourism and casino revenue. His office declined to comment following the bankruptcy filing.
The Chapter 11 filing means ACX1 is pursuing reorganization rather than an immediate shutdown. The irony is that the film industry ecosystem ACX1 was trying to pioneer in South Jersey is now thriving, just largely elsewhere in the state. Whether a restructured version of the studio can realistically capitalize on that momentum remains to be seen. What’s clear is that the pier’s next chapter is, once again, unwritten.
