By Lou Hirsh and Jelena Schulz
The nearly $500 million Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, set to open Thursday in a former department store, showcases the history of big-screen movies at a time when real estate demand is rapidly shifting to the production of at-home streaming entertainment.
Planned for decades by the organization that has presented the glitzy annual Oscars ceremony since 1929, the 300,000-square-foot development in L.A.’s Miracle Mile neighborhood is billed as the largest museum in North America geared to film culture. It will open as the industry seeks to burnish its status as the absolute center of global entertainment.
The museum is designed to immerse visitors in an era that spanned much of the past century, with hundreds of items to be exhibited from Dorothy’s ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz” to the sole surviving shark replica from “Jaws.”
“We are living in changing and ever-evolving times, and now more than ever we need to come together to share our stories, learn from one another and bond over being entertained and delighted,” Academy Museum Director and President Bill Kramer said during a Sept. 21 media briefing at the development at the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. “This is what movies do.”
The movie industry has been shaken in the pandemic as viewers have migrated at accelerating speed from theaters to living rooms. While box office tallies have recovered from a year ago, the big Hollywood studios now depend on TV and streaming services to reach large swaths of their audiences as many people avoid the neighborhood cineplex amid lingering COVID concerns.
The streaming services themselves — Netflix, Amazon, Apple and a host of others — are now also producing big-budget movies. The entertainment news site Variety reported that Netflix alone released more original movies and TV shows in 2019 — 371 — than the entire TV and cable industry did in 2005.
Growing hunger for affordable at-home entertainment has in turn spurred streaming giants to expand their production facilities. Developers have responded with multiple projects in L.A., including a planned doubling of studio space at Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood.
Demand for Entertainment
“From big screen to online — and despite all the various incarnations that the film industry has gone through over the years — the need remains high for a controlled environment to make content,” said Carl Muhlstein, international director in JLL’s Los Angeles office, in a report this month from the brokerage firm. He noted soundstage occupancy has stayed consistently around 95% since 2015, fueled largely by the online content boom.
The Academy Museum did not make a representative available to CoStar News for an interview. But the museum’s listed development goals include preserving the silver screen as an integral piece of the global entertainment scene.
The venue was developed in two buildings, including one dating back to the 1930s when it operated as a May Co. department store and more recently as part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The Academy Museum has more than 30,000 square feet of exhibition space and two on-site theaters with a total of 1,288 seats, with one of those theaters housed in the eye-grabbing new spherical structure.
There’s also an on-site, two-story restaurant spanning 10,000 square feet and a 2,600-square-foot retail space off its grand lobby. The project was designed by a team that includes Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Gensler and WHY Architects.
Depending on how it plays with potential visitors, the development could shape the next chapter for a rapidly evolving film and TV production industry that had a pre-pandemic regional economic impact topping $158 billion annually for greater Los Angeles, according to consulting firm Beacon Economics.
Like Los Angeles, the movie industry sprawled significantly over the past century as major studios such as MGM, Disney, Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox set up operations well beyond Hollywood. And production spread well beyond Los Angeles to places including New Mexico, Georgia and Vancouver.
Film historian Jonathan Kuntz said the new museum could provide the industry with something that is rare not only in Los Angeles but in the U.S. in general — one large venue that puts year-round, alternating movie industry exhibits and programming under a single roof, potentially creating a cultural bond and planting the seeds for a revival of big-screen films.
“Hollywood has always been more like a state of mind,” said Kuntz, a lecturer at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. “There was never really any place that most visitors could go to in Los Angeles to get the full culture or experience of movie-making unless you took a studio tour.”
But it still could take more than a monument to the industry’s big-screen glory days to restore its luster for an audience now accustomed to big feature presentations in the comfort of their own homes. While movie theaters and their Oscar-hopeful fare are not in imminent danger of extinction, they could end up being appendages of the streaming ecosystem.
Kuntz noted Netflix, for instance, purchased the vintage Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard last year with plans for a major remodeling, a strategy that could help the streaming giant showcase selected productions with red-carpet events.
“It very much remains to be seen how old Hollywood is going to figure into the future of this new Hollywood,” Kuntz told CoStar News. “The future of movies seen on big screens in big theaters is very much in question right now.”