2121 Avenue of the Stars

2121 Avenue of the Stars, originally called Fox Plaza, is a 34-story, 493-foot skyscraper in Century City, Los Angeles, California. The Irvine Company, based in Orange County, owns it.

Billionaire Marvin Davis developed Fox Plaza on land he kept after selling the adjacent 20th Century Fox studio to Rupert Murdoch in 1985. The tower was finished in 1987, with Scott Johnson of Johnson Fain as the lead design architect. After leaving office, former President Ronald Reagan had his offices on the 34th floor for several years. In 1988, Davis sold his 50% stake to 20th Century Fox, a major tenant, which then sold it that same year to La Salle Partners for $320 million. Davis bought it back from La Salle in 1997 for $253 million, then sold it again in 2000 to Donald Bren’s Irvine Company for $350 million. As of 2019, 20th Century Studios occupied the 34th floor. In 2022, Chicago law firm Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP leased 46,000 square feet of office space there.

The building’s exterior features rust-red granite and glass panels. Its HVAC system uses a large vertical air shaft in the core, drawing cooler outdoor air from below to each floor’s fan room and exhausting stale air on the roof, leveraging the stack effect.

In a 2018 Variety tour, the chief engineer noted the building’s many design redundancies, speculating it was meant for filming. Fox Plaza has appeared in at least four major Fox films. Its most famous role was in the 1988 film Die Hard, where, still under construction, it stood in for the fictional Nakatomi Plaza; a scale model was used for the damaged version. For the film’s 30th anniversary in 2018, a screening was held outside with the building as backdrop. Call of Duty: Warzone added Nakatomi Plaza to its Verdansk ’84 map for the “80s Action Heroes” event, though Die Hard references were later removed.

The plaza and a neighboring building are the main setting for the 1994 comedy Airheads, housing fictional radio station KPPX. Fox Plaza was also one of the buildings destroyed at the end of Fight Club. It plays a key role in the Brooklyn Nine-Nine episode “99,” where detective Jake Peralta insists on visiting it because of Die Hard, causing his squad to miss their flight. The building can be seen from the InterContinental Hotel pool across the street in the “Sunblock 5000” ad in Robocop 2 (1990).

In the 2024 film Deadpool & Wolverine, the Nakatomi Plaza version appears, pruned and sent to the Void by the Time Variance Authority.