Drive past the main gate on any given Tuesday and you might think you've taken a wrong turn. The streets look like New York, circa 1940. A brownstone stoop here, a fire escape there, a stretch of cobblestone that ends abruptly at a chain-link fence. Step around the corner and you're in a small-town American square, complete with a gazebo and a fake clock tower that hasn't told the correct time since the Eisenhower administration. Welcome to the backlot: Hollywood's strangest, most resilient institution.
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For more than a century, these open-air permanent sets have been California's secret weapon in the movie business. They're the reason you've watched a hundred films set in Chicago, Paris, or Anytown, U.S.A. and never once left the San Fernando Valley. The backlot doesn't get the marquee treatment. No star on the Walk of Fame for a stretch of fake pavement. But kill it, and you kill something irreplaceable about the way movies get made.
Right now, the backlot is fighting for its life. The fight is happening mostly in plain sight, mostly in California, and mostly without the fanfare it deserves.
Acres of Illusion: What a Backlot Actually Is
The concept is almost absurdly simple. A studio buys a large piece of land, builds permanent standing sets on it — facades, streetscapes, exterior environments — and rents those sets, production by production, for decades. The same New York street that hosted a gangster picture in 1952 becomes a cop procedural backdrop in 1987 and an HBO pilot in 2019. The bones stay. The stories change.
Universal Studios in Universal City has operated one of the most famous backlots in the world since the early 1910s, when Carl Laemmle turned a chicken ranch in the hills above the Cahuenga Pass into a fully functioning film factory. Sony Pictures, still operating out of the old MGM lot in Culver City, has a backlot with standing sets used in productions going back generations. Paramount, the only major studio still headquartered inside the Hollywood city limits proper, has maintained its New York street backlot continuously since the silent era.
Warner Bros.' backlot in Burbank, all 110 acres of it, may be the most storied of them all. The streets of Stars Hollow. Gilmore Girls fans know them by heart. The Midwest hometown in "Music and Lyrics." The Central Perk exterior that never actually appeared on camera in "Friends" but lived on the lot anyway. If you've watched American television in the last 50 years, you've spent significant time in Burbank without realizing it.
The Bulldozer Years: When Real Estate Almost Won
The backlot's greatest enemy was never streaming or tax credits or any force in the entertainment industry. It was the California real estate market.
Through the 1970s and '80s, studios discovered that the land under their sprawling outdoor sets was worth a staggering amount of money. MGM sold off a huge chunk of its Culver City backlot in the early 1970s, the famous Lot 3, where the Yellow Brick Road had been built for "The Wizard of Oz," and the land eventually became a housing development. 20th Century Fox sold off the majority of its backlot in Century City. That land is now an upscale shopping mall and a cluster of office towers. The Avenue of the Stars runs directly through what was once a functioning film set.
The calculation was brutal and straightforward. An acre of Los Angeles land could generate a one-time sale price that, in the short term, looked much more attractive than decades of rental income from film productions. Studio executives under pressure from parent corporations took the deals. Los Angeles lost its backlots one sale at a time.
What survived did so partly by accident, partly by stubbornness, and partly because certain studio heads understood — or were forced to understand — that the infrastructure of filmmaking has value that doesn't show up cleanly on a balance sheet until it's gone.
The Streaming Gold Rush: Too Much Work, Not Enough Space
Then came the streaming boom, and suddenly the backlot looked like genius urban planning.
From roughly 2015 through the early 2020s, the appetite for content from Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney+, HBO Max, and a half-dozen other platforms drove California production to levels that strained every resource the industry had. Stages went dark for years, not because they weren't in use, but because they were booked solid. Crews couldn't find space. Productions that would have shot in Los Angeles relocated to Georgia or New Mexico simply because the physical infrastructure at home couldn't absorb the volume.
Backlots, during this period, became extraordinarily valuable. A standing exterior set means a production doesn't have to spend weeks building, dressing, and striking a location. It means the art department can prep while another unit is still shooting. It compresses schedules and saves money in ways that are hard to quantify until you try to make a period drama without one.
Studios that had held onto their outdoor acreage found themselves sitting on assets their competitors had sold for condominiums. There's a particular irony in that. The short-term thinkers made the real estate money. The long-term thinkers ended up with the business.
The Correction: What the Slowdown Means for Physical Space
The streaming pullback that began in 2022 and accelerated through the dual strikes of 2023 hit California production hard. Pilot orders dropped. Series got shorter. Projects in development got quietly shelved. The state's production volume, which had been at historic highs, contracted sharply.
For the backlot, the slowdown created a complicated new pressure. Less production means less rental income from the sets. At the same time, the underlying land value in the San Fernando Valley and Culver City hasn't dropped. The math that tempted studios to sell in the 1970s is back on the table, dressed in slightly different clothes.
Industry observers watching the ongoing Warner Bros. Discovery situation, the corporate maneuvering over the studio's future that has drawn significant attention in California, point to the Burbank backlot as one of the central questions. What happens to 110 acres in Burbank depends enormously on who's making the decisions and what they think the film business looks like in 2035.
The Crew Ecosystem: Why the Backlot Is Never Just About the Backlot
Here's the thing that gets lost when backlot discussions stay at the level of corporate real estate. The outdoor sets aren't just convenient shooting locations. They anchor an ecosystem.
Within walking distance of every functioning backlot in Los Angeles County, you'll find rental houses, grip and electric suppliers, prop warehouses, catering operations, transportation companies, and a dense web of freelance workers whose schedules are organized around studio proximity. When a backlot closes, those businesses don't relocate to follow it. Many of them close. The people who worked them don't move to Atlanta or Albuquerque. They leave the industry.
California has spent years trying to quantify this through its film and television tax credit program, with the state Legislature expanding credits specifically to keep production local. But tax credits can't rebuild a backlot that's been turned into a parking structure. That kind of loss is permanent.
The cobblestones in Burbank are still there. For now.