The U.K.’s booming studio sector — one which has seen numerous new facilities announced and opened across the country over the last few years to cope with fast-rising demand, and ongoing expansions at those sites already established — could be under serious threat should the SAG-AFTRA strike not be resolved soon.
So warns one studio boss, who says that the reliance of U.K. space on Hollywood productions (inward investment, almost entirely from U.S. studios and streamers, accounted for 86 percent of the 2022’s record $7.8 billon spent on film and high-end TV production in 2022) has put many facilities in the firing line.
“I think it’s potentially a disaster,” says Nick Smith, joint managing director of the recently-opened Shinfield Studios, which currently has nine of its planned 18 sound stages open (and is set to be the fourth largest in the U.K. when it’s fully operational in early 2024). Disney+’ Star Wars series The Acolyte recently wrapped at Shinfield, where it took over the first four stages that opened, but whereas a major new studio project would usually be waiting in the wings and booked to immediately fill that space, Smith says fears leading up to both the writers strike and now actors strike mean it’s now sitting empty.
“It was noticeable really from April when everybody was saying there was going to be some action so started to push the schedules back and back,” he says. “And now even for the things that were pushed back, people are saying they might not happen.”
Alongside Shinfield, Smith asserts that other U.K. facilities such as Ealing and Elstree — studios that largely work project to project — will likely also be “significantly” impacted. But he says that the established studios like Pinewood and Shepperton, which both have long-term leases in place for much of their sites (Pinewood with Disney and Shepperton with Netflix), should be “largely unaffected.”
Even before the actors strike, there had been a noticeable wobble on the upward trajectory of U.K. studios market, with Blackstone and Hudson Pacific’s $900 million Sunset Studios development in Hertfordshire — an expansion of its California facility — having been put on hold. Nothing was formally announced, but Smith cites uncertainty over business tax rates in the U.K., plus construction inflation and the rising cost of utilities, and now both writers and actors strikes.
“You put all of these factors into the melting pot and I think you’ve got a lot of very nervous people about to write a very large cheque saying, is this really the best time to build new infrastructure in the U.K.?”
As for Shinfield’s ongoing development, Smith says the plan is to use the downtime during the strike to focus on the construction of the additional nine stages due to open by next year. But he’s remaining positive that the demand will still be there to fill them.
“There’s nothing really to suggest that the U.K. isn’t going to be attractive for production going forward,” he says. “So if anything, I think we’re going to have something like the COVID effect, where everything stops and there’s a massive rush, and I want to be ready with as many stages as I possibly can when that rush comes along.”
