Rams owner Stan Kroenke is looking to step into Hollywood, with the construction of a studio and production facility.
Hollywood Park Studios will initially serve as the temporary hub for broadcasters that have acquired the rights to cover the 2028 Olympics, Kroenke’s company announced Tuesday. After the summer games, it will be made available for film and TV production as part of a broader vision to transform the property into a media, entertainment and technology campus.
The first phase of construction for Hollywood Park Studios calls for five 18,000 square foot soundstages, two of which will open to a single stage double that size, across 12 acres. It will also feature a three-story 80,000 square foot office building to support production and postproduction services, as well as some bells and whistles to support operations, including a 1,100 car capacity parking structure and garage that can accommodate sixty trailers.
Depending on demand, as many as 20 soundstages and an additional 200,000 square feet of office space will be built.
Kroenke’s company joins a spate of private equity and real estate firms that rapidly acquired, constructed and expanded stage facilities before the strikes, betting on continuing demand for such space. This includes BARDAS Investment Group and Bain Capital Real Estate, which announced in 2022 a $600 million redevelopment of the former Television Center.
Amid an increasingly crowded market of soundstage operators, a [snapshot of production levels](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/los-angeles-film-tv-soundstage-vacancy-historically-high-1236180832/) in Los Angeles showed a steep decline in stage occupancy over the past two years, highlighting the plunge in filming in the region, according to an April FilmLA report. Seventeen studios that operate the majority of stages in L.A. posted average occupancy rates of 63 percent last year, down from 69 percent in 2023. The figures mark a dramatic departure from the 93.5 percent rate that studios reported their stages were used from 2016 to 2022.
By Kroenke’s thinking, media and sports are increasingly converging as entertainment distribution expands through multiple mediums.
“The vision for Hollywood Park has always been to build a city within a city combining media, entertainment and technology that will transform the greater Los Angeles area,” Kroenke said in a statement. Beyond 2028, he added that the property will be “welcome a new industry to our live, work, play destination and bring a little bit of Hollywood to Hollywood Park.”
Hollywood Park Studios is a part of master development plans for the 300-acre mixed use property, which is anchored by SoFi Stadium, YouTube Theater and the NFL Media office building. It includes apartments, shops, restaurants and a movie theater, with the construction of a $300 million luxury hotel intended to house visiting teams — and possibly talent who may be filming at the nearby production campus — underway.
Competing regions, including the U.K., New York, Georgia and Ontario, have more than doubled their stage-based production capacity over the past five years. L.A., which has an estimated 8 million square feet of production space and 13 planned studio projects in the pipeline, maintains an infrastructure advantage, but the decline in production has made it more challenging to fill vacancies.