Billboard Women in Music 2025
In a notable change at Fox‘s storied West Los Angeles lot, Disney will pull up stakes there when its lease is up next March, ending a multi-year stay borne of one of the biggest mergers in media history.
Disney has occupied a significant amount of space on the lot since closing its $71.3 billion deal to acquire most of 21st Century Fox in 2019. It will vacate by the end of the year, ahead of the March 2026 expiration of its lease, multiple sources confirmed to Deadline. Disney intends to consolidate its operations in a “creative hub” in its corporate home of Burbank.
In the wake of the Disney-Fox deal, the FX and 20th Television teams, led by John Landgraf and Karey Burke, had remained based on the Pico Boulevard lot. They will now join the relocation to Burbank by the end of the year.
In a brief statement provided to Deadline, a Fox spokesperson called the company’s lot “second to none in terms of location and premium production and post-production facilities available.” The company has said it receives about $50 million a year from renting out 15 sound stages and other studio space and facilities. Along with Paramount’s Melrose lot and smaller ones still operating in Hollywood and Culver City, the Fox lot has a pedigree, having housed productions over the decades like The Sound of Music and Miracle on 34th Street.
The industry landscape of 2025 and ’26 is a lot different than it was six-plus years ago when the mega-merger was completed. The streaming boom initially led to a steep rise in production across the city and elsewhere. Even though production has since contracted, especially in L.A., optimism is running high that a proposal to double California’s film and TV tax credit in the state will be passed by state legislators. The dramatically stepped-up incentives, promoted in recent months by Gov. Gavin Newsom, would be the first positive development in years for tempest-tossed production crews in Southern California. After the upheaval of Covid, production returned but then went dark again for months amid the dual strikes of 2023. Steep financial cuts have also reshaped the media industry during this time.
Even without the tax credit, Fox has fielded significant interest from multiple parties, one source familiar with the discussions told Deadline. The space occupied by Disney could be leased to multiple parties over varying terms, as is already the case for the “New York street” on the Fox lot, which hosts music videos and commercials along with films and series.
Since William Fox started Fox Film Corp. in 1915, the West L.A. studio lot has regularly undergone transformation. As it was grappling with the expensive and ultimately unsuccessful film Cleopatra in the late-1950s and early-1960s, Fox sold its 260-acre parcel of land to Alcoa, which then leased back about one-third of the acreage for Fox to continue its production activities. The remaining land was developed as Century City, a corporate, retail and residential section of L.A.
