STUDIO SPACE AT A PREMIUM
TORONTO HAS TOO MANY PRODUCTIONS, NOT ENOUGH ROOM
“Star Trek: Discovery” is holding on to its studio space with a Vulcan death grip —
Space: it’s the final frontier in the Star Trek universe. It’s also a mission requirement for the Toronto-filmed TV series “Star Trek: Discovery,” which sprawls across the 45,900-square-foot Mega Stage at Pinewood Toronto Studios.
The CBS series, which airs on Bell Media cable channel Space, has been holding on to Toronto’s largest studio space with a Vulcan death grip since it began filming in April 2016.
Hosting the high-profile series has aggravated a problem in the city: too many productions, not enough studio space.
“With ‘Star Trek’ being there for a number of years, it’s taken that stage out of the market,” says Scott Alexander, who has been a location manager in Toronto for the past 20 years. “We haven’t been able to draw in the really big projects that would utilize that space’s height and width,” he adds.
A growing number of television projects is partly to blame for the squeeze, says Magali Simard, film sector development officer for the City of Toronto.
“Now that TV series long format has really taken over in terms of the percentage of how much is shot in Toronto ... they take studio space for a much longer period of time,” says Simard. “It’s a bit harder to fit a feature film or a smaller project than it was before.”
The city’s film and television industry took a $200-million dip from $2 billion to $1.8 billion between 2016 and 2017, according to data compiled by Toronto’s Economic Development and Culture Division. “The only thing that made it dip a little bit was that we were suddenly full,” Simard says. Some blockbuster productions, such as the X-Men movie “The New Mutants,” chose to film in cities with more available facilities.
Numbers for 2018, not yet available, are on track to rise, but until new studio space opens the problem might affect Toronto’s ability to lure the biggest and buzziest projects.
“If you are a massive production that might be greenlit in the next year or so you start increasingly having to put holds (on Toronto studios) well in advance,” Simard says.
Due to a lack of studio space, Alexander has been instructed to look into alternative venues for the upcoming FX Productions series “Mrs. America” with Cate Blanchett, which will begin filming in Toronto in mid-June.
In the past, Alexander has had to get creative and scout industrial buildings that could be converted.
He recently talked a clothing-recycling operation into temporarily relinquishing their warehouse so it could be used as a studio.
That’s not ideal, especially on larger projects.
“They all have posts every 30 feet,” he says, noting this type of layout obstructs shots. “There are some older studio spaces that you work out of that if it rains really hard you can hear it on the roof.
“There are places where water leaks. There is a warehouse that we use that is close to a road and the soundproofing isn’t completely in it. You have to bring police officers in to intermittently stop the traffic if you have major dialogue scenes.“
But several high-profile builds are expected to open in and around Toronto by fall 2020 that may alleviate the shortage.
“Production studios are already trying to put holds on things that don’t even exist for 2020, 2021,” says Simard.
First up is CBS Stages Canada, a 260,000-square-foot facility that is slated to open in Mississauga later this year. While CBS productions will have first rights to the space, it will be available to outside productions as well.
In Markham, construction is set to begin this spring on the 400,000-square-foot Markham Movieland studio complex. Aiming for a 2020 opening, it will have a 70,000-square-foot sound stage — the largest in North America and not much smaller than the 78,954 square foot Stage 15 at Babelsberg Film Studios in Potsdam, Germany, the largest in the world.
Bell Media is spearheading a 200,000-square-foot expansion at Pinewood while just a fiveminute drive away, Toronto’s Cinespace Film Studios is creating a new studio with 165,000-square-feet of production space. Cinespace is also opening the 50,000-squarefoot Titan Studios at its Kipling Campus, where “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Netflix’s superhero series “Titans” films. The new space plans to include an underwater filming tank, something missing from Toronto’s studios.
When Alexander worked on 2016’s “Suicide Squad,” he had to negotiate with the Canadian military to set up a giant tank in Hamilton’s John Weir Foote V.C. Armoury in order to film scenes of an underwater subway station and a submerged car.
And while 1,075,000-squarefeet of new studio space may sound excessive, Simard predicts it will allow Toronto to woo an ever expanding cabal of players.
“Amazon is in town, Apple is starting to spend a lot. It’s not even a guess for the next few years. It is the complete golden age of content creation.”
In the meantime, productions will continue to improvise. The sci-fi series “The Expanse” splits time between Pinewood and Cinespace as it films its fourth season.
Manny Danelon, producer on “The Expanse,” says Toronto doesn’t have to look to London or Los Angeles for a blueprint of a city where studios thrive. “Think about what Montreal and Vancouver did so eloquently by building purposebuilt studio spaces,” he says. “If we build it, they will come.”