L.A. Soundstage Occupancy Held Steady During First Half Of 2025 But Way Off Peak

Los Angeles is the worldwide leader in available soundstage space, but plenty of it is going unused. FilmLA said Wednesday that its data for the first six months of 2025 shows just a 62% average occupancy rate, but the bright spot is that’s down only slightly from the 63% soundstage occupancy in 2024.

But the report (read it here) continues a downward trend since in place since the strike year of 2023, when L.A.-area soundstage occupancy was at 69%. The number for the first half of 2025 represents a 35.4% decline from the peak of 96% occupancy in 2016, when FilmLA published its inaugural “Sound Stage Production Report.” The numbers remained in the mid-90s through the Covid era before a significant 25.6% decrease from 2022 to 2023. Here is a comparison:

FilmLA, the partner film office for the City and County of Los Angeles and other local jurisdictions, said the total number of projects shot on participant stages from January-June 2025 increased slightly by 5% from 1,225 to 1,287 between 2023 and 2024. At the same time, the total number of shoot days declined by 8% from 8,671 to 7,940. Much of that can be attributed to a decrease in shoot days associated with scripted TV, which plunged by 23% on participant stages between 2023 and 2024.

The organization defines a “shoot day” as one crew’s permitted filming at one or more locations within a 24-hour period.

The 17 studio participants in FilmLA’s report include all the major legacy studios and the larger independents, representing roughly 75% of the current 6.9 million square feet of certified stage space in the Los Angeles market. While the L.A. area remains the leader in available sound stages, rival markets including New York and the UK have doubled their inventories during the past five years.

The report comes a troubling downturn in on-location filming in L.A., which fell by 16.1% in 2025 after a 14% decline in 2024 and 20% drop in 2023.