Film, TV Productions Drop as Studio Owners Bet on Comeback

Independent studio owners across Los Angeles are struggling to fill their soundstages, including new state-of-the-art facilities.

East End Studios just opened a $230 million five-stage studio with offices in the Arts District in downtown Los Angeles, but no productions have signed on to film there, even with fleeting interest from notable industry players, the Los Angeles Times reported. “We just had all the major networks, all the major streaming platforms walk through this facility and they can’t believe how nice it is,” Shep Wainwright, managing partner of East End Studios, said.

Average soundstage occupancy in Los Angeles dropped to 63 percent in 2024 from 69 percent in 2023 and well below the roughly 90 percent average between 2016 and 2022, per FilmLA data cited by the Times. The pandemic-era slowdown in productions and 2023 actors’ and writers’ strikes, along with the increasing costs of production in Los Angeles, have driven away productions. Shoot days fell 16 percent last year compared to 2024, according to a forthcoming FilmLA report for 2025 cited by the Times.

The declining figures are a fall from grace from just a few years ago. In 2021, independent studio owner Hackman Capital Partners and Square Mile Capital Management bought Radford Studio Center in Studio City for nearly $1.9 billion. The owners defaulted on their $1.1 billion mortgage earlier this month, and lender Goldman Sachs is expected to seize control of the studio lot.

Some studio owners are hopeful that the state’s expanded film tax credits, which grew last year to $750 million from $330 million, will be helpful in stimulating production growth and creating some “green shoots” for the industry, as Wainwright said. “I would like to think that 2024 and 2025 are kind of the bottom and that we’re going to be pulling ourselves up,” he told the Times.

In the meantime, studio developers like East End have been improvising by looking to adaptive reuse as a way of increasing studio space without initiating new construction projects. East End’s new downtown campus is partially built at a former cold-storage facility, and Amazon turned buildings in downtown Culver City into its Culver Studios facility.

— Chris Malone Méndez