A for-sale sign on a small Atwater Village lot says as much about Hollywood's slump as any earnings report.
The listing
BoxCar Studios, a three-stage soundstage complex on Andrita Street in Atwater Village, is on the market for sale or lease, The Hollywood Reporter reported. The facility — about 34,500 square feet of stages on nearly four acres of industrial land — is owned by the Hong Kong-based private equity firm Gaw Capital, which bought it in 2018 for about $31 million and put millions more into renovations before listing it through the brokerage CBRE. No asking price has been disclosed. The lot has industry history: a long-running ABC soap opera taped there, and Netflix has used the stages.
A market in retreat
The timing reflects a broader slump. Los Angeles soundstage occupancy has fallen from roughly 93 percent in 2019 to around 62 percent in 2025, according to figures cited by The Hollywood Reporter, as streaming services that once raced to book every available stage pulled back their spending. Stages that were nearly impossible to reserve a few years ago now sit idle for long stretches. The causes have stacked up: the 2023 writers' and actors' strikes halted production for much of that year, and the recovery has lagged, while projects that might have shot in Los Angeles have decamped for places with richer incentives — Georgia, Britain and Canada among them.
Sacramento's response
California has tried to fight back. Gov. Gavin Newsom championed a major expansion of the state's film and television tax credit, scaling the program up sharply and adding a dedicated incentive aimed at keeping soundstage work in the state, per the California Film Commission. Industry observers have welcomed the move but caution that incentive dollars take time to translate into booked stages, leaving the near-term picture for facilities like BoxCar uncertain.
What the sale signals
For Gaw Capital, putting the property up for sale or lease suggests flexibility — or pressure — in a market that does not make a quick, profitable exit obvious. The industrial zoning could, in theory, open the door to non-production uses, though local advocates have fought to preserve production-zoned land, arguing every stage lost to redevelopment is hard to replace. A buyer betting on the tax-credit expansion and an eventual rebound might see a discounted entry into a market with room to recover; a developer eyeing nearly four acres in a gentrifying neighborhood might do the math differently. For now, the Andrita Street stages sit quiet, waiting on an industry still deciding what they are worth.
