Shadowbox Makes Ambitious Plans for Newhall
The leader of a project looking to develop more than 1 million square feet of Santa Clarita sat down with the Santa Clarita Valley Business Journal inside the SCV Chamber of Commerce’s office to talk about Shadowbox Studios’ ambitious plans and why they’re filling a vital industry need.
Jeff Weber is working to create about 1.2 million square feet of sound stage space and ancillary development in Placerita Canyon and Saugus, and approximately 2 million square feet in Atlanta on behalf of the full-service independent studio platform.
The Shadowbox proposal for Newhall calls for the 93 acres near the northeast corner of 13th and Arch streets to include almost a half-million square feet of sound stages, more than 560,000 square feet of workshops, warehouses and support structures, and about 220,000 square feet of office space and facilities to support all of the operations just listed, such as catering and specialty services.
Weber said the Santa Clarita move came from the head of Blackhall, which was the name of Shadowbox prior to a rebranding announcement last summer. The facility in Atlanta has hosted productions like “Jumanji: The Next Level,” “Jungle Cruise” and ‘“Godzilla: King of the Monsters,” and the company felt a footprint in Los Angeles was necessary.
And when it came time to find that space, the city of Santa Clarita stood out for a number of reasons, Weber said.
“We drove a ton of properties ... all the way up from the South Bay and Malibu to Hollywood and then through the San Fernando Valley and Simi Valley and then up to Santa Clarita Valley just to make sure we hit them all,” Weber said during the recent interview. “And ... it didn’t take much more than a few minutes of windshield time in front of our site to imagine a beautiful studio facility befitting the neighborhood rising up from the scrub brush.”
He added that one of the facility’s primary design considerations was keeping traffic moving in and out of the facility, as well as through the surrounding area.
“At first you wonder whether Santa Clarita is too far off the beaten path,” he added. “But once you recognize the reverse commute and the fact that the industry is already well-established here, it just makes so much sense. When you drive up here, I mean, you see this really clean, wideopen, safe place where people live and work and have elbow room and all seem to have smiles on their faces.”
On top of having one of the scarcest resources in L.A. County — significant plots of developable land near free
ways — and a location in the film-friendly 30-Mile Zone, which offers tax rebates for production costs, it’s also clear that the city of Santa Clarita is very supportive of creating more local high-paying jobs in the industry.
“It’ll be up to the Planning Commission and City Council if it gets approved,” said Jason Crawford, community development director for the city of Santa Clarita, in a recent interview discussing several studios that have recently been built or are in the approval process, including LA North and Rye Canyon Studios, and the expansion of Santa Clarita Studios.
“But it does show, and all of these (projects) together show, what a big interest in movie studios there are,” he added, “and that’s great for us because it’s clean industry jobs that pay a lot. We have got a lot of residents that work in the film industry. So, it is fantastic for us from an economic development perspective.”
And it’s a relationship that benefits the industry, too, with a recent proliferation of content producers like Netflix, Hulu, Paramount, et al, especially since the pandemic, creating a huge demand for more space to produce that content.
“The entertainment industry has been on a tremendous growth with all of the additional streaming services,” said Mike Delorenzo, president of Santa Clarita Studios, the city’s first purpose-built facility. “We have been booked for the last, give or take, 10 years,” he said during an interview in December. “We’ve grown and grown.”
And with the industry now trending toward a larger number of smaller productions, rather than planning around the traditional one or two massive “tent pole”sized blockbuster productions a year, space is becoming a premium.
“My understanding is that it is more cost-effective for studios to rent studio space than to build it,” Weber said.
All of which make the plans for Shadowbox Studios in Santa Clarita the right place at the right time.
Or at least, that’s the plan, pending approval from local officials, who received a sneak preview during a Feb. 21 Planning Commission meeting, when a tour of the site was given.
The studio also is looking to develop additional soundstage space at the site of the former Saugus Speedway on Soledad Canyon Road, a few miles from the main Newhall campus. The plans for that 40-acre lot call for a partnership with home-builder Integral that will include more than 300 homes from the home developer and six 11,000-plus-square-foot sound stages from Shadowbox.