With Netflix announcing a deal to occupy Shepperton Studios, Disney announce a decade long deal to use most of Pinewood Studios for their own productions, meaning Star Wars, Disney live action and Marvel films will be made here in the UK for at least the next ten years.
Over the years, Pinewood Studios has been the production home of numerous James Bond films and a favored facility for other such blockbusters as the “Hobbit” movies and “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.” Disney has used the facility most recently for its new “Star Wars” installments. The Times of London reported that Disney’s deal would give the Mouse use of almost all of Pinewood, except for a couple of television studios, for 10 years.
Several studio creation or expansion projects are in the works around the U.K., including at Pinewood itself. It opened five new soundstages in 2016, has planned for the addition of six more by next year and is eyeing a further expansion after that. Shepperton, too, has received permission to build 16 more soundstages, with the first of them in operation possibly in 2021.
Since 2010, almost a third of all movies with budgets of more than $100 million have filmed at Pinewood Group’s studios around the world, including sites in North America and Asia. But while the company is expanding in Britain, where a production boom bears no signs of slowing down, in the past two months it has announced that it is pulling out of its studio partnerships in Atlanta and Malaysia.
