Inside Sky Studios Elstree: Home Of ‘Wicked’, ‘Paddington In Peru’, New ‘Bridget Jones’ & ‘Jurassic’ Movies… And Sometimes A Hawk Called Zeus
EXCLUSIVE: When Deadline visits Sky Studios Elstree there is a hawk named Zeus arriving on site to scare off smaller birds making their homes in the warmth of the site’s 12 soundstages. Several major movies have, however, already taken flight at the 586,800 sq. ft. site in Hertfordshire, 15 miles outside central London. Not to be confused with the UK’s historic Elstree Studios, the site provides a home for projects from Comcast’s NBCUniversal, Sky as well as third parties.
Zeus’ services were not required when local songbirds made the studio their home in real-life foliage on a Wicked set, and, in fact, their warbling remained in the final cut.
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Universal shot Parts 1 and 2 of Wicked back-to-back at Sky Studios Elstree, with the first notching the biggest opening for a movie based on a Broadway musical at $162.5 million. StudioCanal’s recent release Paddington in Peru also shot at the studio, while Universal’s Jurassic World Rebirth and Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy have wrapped there. Sky’s Christmas special Bad Tidings was housed at the studio as were Sky TV shows Unofficial Science of… and A League of Their Own: The Rally.
After an unseasonal smattering of snow, it’s cold as Deadline takes the tour, checking out camera phone pics of the train from Wicked being craned into position – its sheer size meaning it could not negotiate a corner leading to the back lot. However, the team behind the facility hope the industry is heating up after last year’s dual strikes and they are not lacking in ambition. The goal, they say, is for this to be the best film and TV studio in the world. “We want it to be the best place anywhere, the number one choice,” says Noel Tovey, Managing Director at Sky Studios Elstree and a former exec at Pinewood, Warner Bros. Leavesden and Shepperton Studios.
“Starting with a blank sheet of paper helps,” he adds, as Jeff LaPlante, President of Physical Production for Universal Pictures, picks up the thread: “You notice it when you’re there. The workshops are right in the middle of the lot, for example, so they’re easily accessed from all stages. It’s those kinds of things that show the benefit of all the learnings.”
The studios team talks up the commitment to sustainability, access and training. While you do not see the rooftop solar panels from the ground, the sustainability cred was borne out when the studio got top marks in the latest results from BAFTA Albert Studio Sustainability measure, as first reported by Deadline in May. It’s also accessible, with numerous ways in which the facilities allow disabled workers and talent to seamlessly do their jobs.
For the next generation, there is Sky Up Academy Studios, which gives school-age children a taste of the movie business with an immersive set-up including an XR studio and costumes gathered from movie sets that youngsters can incorporate into film pitches. A Top Trumps-style deck of cards for the scholars gives info on industry roles from First AD to prop maker to catering manager. Sky expects to welcome 10,000 kids a year.
But all of that counts for little unless there is a steady pipeline of film and TV coming through the gates – or, technically, the flat arch – that welcomes visitors. Given it services NBCU and Sky, a stream of big-ticket projects is guaranteed. And that’s kind of the point.
“Comcast having just acquired a UK-based business meant we were in a good position to build a studio that could be used for all of our production needs,” says Sky Studios COO Caroline Cooper. Her role includes oversight of Sky Studio Elstree as well as Sky Studios (somewhat confusingly, ‘Sky Studios’ is also the name of the pay TV giant’s production arm).
“Both sides of the business were very enthusiastic,” she adds. “The CEOs were on board. It just felt, given both companies ambitions to produce top-quality, high-end film and television, having our own facility, which we had first position on, would be a really strong strategic asset.”
Hollywood studios like to shoot in the UK, which is talent-friendly, has a competitive tax credit, seasoned crews and solid infrastructure. Speaking to Deadline from LA, LaPlante sums it up thusly: “All the infrastructure you need to make an entire movie is there, and then on top of that, you get the benefit of the tax credit. It enabled us to make these two [Wicked] movies together at once.”
Space & Time
Fueled by streamer expansion, space, especially close to London, was in short supply back in 2019 when Sky Studios Elstree was announced. Warner Bros. already had its own site at Leavesden, Netflix had a deal to take most of Shepperton with Amazon also taking space there, and Disney had struck an agreement with Pinewood.
“We felt that pressure coming,” says LaPlante. “We were the last Universal movie in Pinewood (Jurassic World Dominion) before the Disney deal went into effect. Sky Studios Elstree gives us the flexibility to go into the UK, to know we have our own home and to make sure that we always have space for our films. That’s a big thing. It gets extremely busy in the UK as we all know, so it’s an important investment and opportunity for us.”
The studio was duly built. Work started in late 2020 and was almost – but not entirely – complete when both Wicked movies started shooting in Feb. 2023. That delivered a sink or swim moment. “By time they were coming up to shoot, we’d finished all of their stages and we’re just making the final touches on the remaining few,” says Sophie Owen Street, VP of Strategy & Business at Sky Studios Elstree. “It was obviously a challenge for the team to balance those dynamics – construction on part of your site and production on another – and it meant we got shoved in the deep end. I think it made us stronger as a team, because all of your processes and how you work together, all of that was formed in these exaggerated circumstances.”
“Some of the systems were still in process of being put online, so it definitely took a lot of flexibility and patience from the departments and from the production team,” adds LaPlante.
He goes on to explain the logistical undertaking of shooting two huge films at the same time – in a new facility. “We had about 70 sets to build between both movies, and we constantly had to think, ‘This stage is coming online here, so we’re going to build this set, then we’re going to shoot this set, then we’re going to tear down the set, rebuild another set, think about where can we recycle sets, you know take walls and just turn them into something else’. It was solving a lot of those puzzles that was probably the biggest challenge.”
Striking Plans
In terms of production, it went from the best of times to, arguably, the worst of times pretty fast for the industry. From pent-up demand and streamers and studios scrambling for space, a combination of the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and a surge in energy costs, and the dual Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes – and all against a backdrop of Brexit – changed the picture.
Wicked was put on ice. “The real frustration was we had six days left on both movies to shoot at that point – we literally had a week and a half of shooting,” LaPlante recalls. “We had to return all the equipment, shut down the prop shop, the set dec, wardrobe and all that had to be wrapped as if we were basically done. You didn’t know how long the strike was going to be, and so we had to wrap it out, and then we had to ramp back up and open it all back up.”
Getting back up and running took 10 weeks and the shoot restarted in January this year. The break “did enable us to have the director and everybody go into the cutting room and look at all the material that they had,” LaPlante says. “It gave us a jump start to not have to do additional photography later, so in that aspect, it helped, but it was challenging.”
The strike impact on Wicked is indicative of what happened in other facilities. Several new studio facilities were greenlit in those pre-strike and pre-pandemic days, and some are reportedly now feeling quiet. When Deadline visits Sky Studios Elstree, there’s a buzz of activity, but it’s not full. Has business returned to normal post-strike?
“We’ve got very strong anchor tenants, so feel that we do have a very healthy pipeline,” Cooper says. “It’s hard to speak to what’s going on in other studios, but these things ebb and flow. It’s definitely got busier again, so we’re starting to see places fill up, which is great for the industry.”
What does the future look like? “What I’m hearing from crew is that the number of projects that are being made hasn’t necessarily reduced, but the budget level has,” says Tovey. “It was a slower start back up because people genuinely were not writing. It just took time to get scripts back.”
Between them, Sky and Universal have gone from looking for space to having to occupy it. “When you own a facility, your job is to fill it up,” LaPlante says.
Big Forecasts
Sky projects the new studio will generate ￡3BN ($3.8BN) investment over its first five years. Studios obviously generate money beyond the splashy budget number of the latest blockbuster and boost the national and local economies. As we walk around, a local artisanal coffee seller is whizzing across the site in his small truck. The local hotels were booked out a week before Deadline visits as Sky held a huge internal show-and-tell.
The Sky part of affairs means Sky Studios Elstree will be the home of UK-originated fare as well as U.S. blockbusters, but there is concern in UK industry ranks that there isn’t available space for domestic indie films and first-time filmmakers. The Sky Studios Elstree team acknowledge the issue and tease an initiative that would see their studio part of an effort to bolster indie and fledgling filmmakers from the UK. Further details are under wraps on what is a 2025 story in the making.
The studios were designed to service movies and series outside the Sky and NBCUniversal footprint, which is also part of the domestic dimension to the story. Owen Street says: “You want to keep the investment within the UK. In the creative industries, if productions want to be here, then you want to make sure they can be. It felt like we were securing our own content pipeline, but there’s also third-party production companies that still need space. When you’ve got lockouts at other facilities, there’s plenty of business.”
StudioCanal’s Paddington in Peru, for instance, was the first big third-party project to shoot at the studio. It lensed while Wicked had shut down because it was unaffected by the strikes.
Being open to third-party fare and the boost to the whole sector is a powerful message as Sky tries to expand the footprint of the Studio by 772,60 sq. ft. The plans have been blocked by the local authorities, but an appeal has been lodged against that decision. If the expansion does ultimately get the go-ahead, it would mean more stages and more back lot space.
“There has been a focus back on physical sets and a little bit of a pullback from location [shooting], so I think we see it as an opportunity to create more great facilities, which means more productions coming into the UK, which means more UK investment,” says Owen Street.
“We also want to perfect the site. There is stuff that we would like to build in that we didn’t quite do the first time around. We know that we’re responsible, sustainable operators, and if somebody is investing in studios, we want to take the bet that it should be us, and that we can do it in the right way.”
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