Manhattan Beach Studios抵押贷款出售营销中强调可转作航天防务制造场地

Manhattan Beach Studios has been the site of filming for projects including Stars Wars: The Mandalorian , a TV series about a heavily armed bounty hunter in a galaxy far, far away.

Now lenders who are selling the property’s $240 million mortgage are promoting the site to potential buyers as a hub for making real space-age weapons.

“The project is strategically positioned within Los Angeles’ prominent aerospace and innovation corridor, anchored by industry leaders such as Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Technologies and SpaceX,” said Cushman & Wakefield , which has the listing.

“A supply-demand imbalance has emerged, driven by the growing concentration of advanced manufacturing users and a limited supply of viable space,” the real estate brokerage said in a presentation. Bids are due July 28.

The marketing pitch reflects Southern California’s shifting economic landscape as the movie business slumps and weapons makers seek to cash in on surging Pentagon spending under President Donald Trump. The defense boom is spurring the revival of a regional industry that once churned out World War II bombers, supersonic Cold War planes and Apollo command and service modules before shrinking after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Manhattan Beach Studios, a 15-soundstage campus where productions have also included Lucasfilm’s Obi-Wan Kenobi and Marvel’s The Avengers , sprawls across 22 acres (8.9 hectares) in the heart of Los Angeles County’s South Bay region. Representatives of the movie lot’s lead lenders, Deutsche Bank AG and Kennedy Wilson, declined to comment.

The South Bay area has spawned more than 100 aerospace and defense technology firms, including Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. The studios are less than two miles from Los Angeles Air Force Base, where responsibilities include “developing, acquiring, equipping, fielding, and sustaining lethal and resilient space capabilities for warfighters.”

The site also comes with approximately 78 megawatts of available power capacity, a draw for manufacturers of products that depend increasingly on artificial intelligence.

“There’s never been a more perfect site for advanced manufacturing,” Kevin Donner, a broker with Cushman, said in an interview. “People have been tracking it for a long time.”

The land under the studios, which were built in 1999 for the Roy E. Disney family, has other potential development options. Housing is one: the average home in Manhattan Beach, a city of about 33,000, is valued at about $3.3 million, according to Zillow Group Inc.

Sports is another: Franchises including the NFL’s Chargers, the NBA’s Lakers and the NHL’s Kings have training facilities in neighboring El Segundo. Nearby Inglewood hosts SoFi Stadium, home to the Chargers and Rams, and the Intuit Dome, where the NBA’s Clippers play.

“Everyone looking at studios wants to see an alternative use,” Donner said.

Then there’s defense technology. Demand for so-called “hard tech” manufacturing space — rockets, drones, robots and other weaponry — has surged since the outbreak of wars in Ukraine and Iran, and with the proposed US defense budget soaring to $1.5 trillion. That’s also spurring the growth of other clusters of rocketry and defense from Washington state to Texas and Florida.

Read more: Texas Emerges as Center of Commercial Space Universe

In the Los Angeles area, aerospace and defense-related tenants have accounted for 11% of new industrial real estate leases since the start of 2025, up from an annual average 2% during the preceding decade, according to a report this month by brokerage Newmark Group Inc. Since last year, aerospace companies have signed 15 leases for almost 4 million square feet (370,000 square meters), Newmark said.

“More government spending tends to lead to more contracts,” said Dain Fedora, Newmark’s head of research for the Southwestern US.

SpaceX still occupies 1 million square feet of manufacturing and engineering space in Hawthorne, near Los Angeles International Airport, even after Musk moved the company’s headquarters to Texas. The demand also extends south through Long Beach and into Orange County. Rocket Lab , Anduril Industries and Relativity Space have leased sites near Long Beach Airport, including hulking old aircraft factories.

Meanwhile, demand for Hollywood production space has waned, even as the state of California offers new tax incentives to woo back movie and TV shoots. Film and television production firms shed 42,000 California jobs from 2022 to 2024, a period when dual strikes by screen actors and script writers halted production.

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Manhattan Beach Studios was part of a massive buying spree by Hackman Capital Partners that ran into trouble after borrowing costs soared in 2022 and the strikes hit the following year. Landlords without a Hollywood studio affiliation, a group that includes Hackman, have been hit particularly hard as production moved out of state or to local studio lots owned by entertainment giants such as Warner Bros., Paramount and Disney.

In 2019, Hackman paid $650 million to Carlyle Group Inc. to acquire the Manhattan Beach campus and MBS Services, which provides lighting and other support for entertainment productions. The services company is now operated and managed separately. Avatar creator James Cameron’s production company, Lightstorm Entertainment, still leases part of the Manhattan Beach site.

Hackman, the largest independent studio and soundstage owner, isn’t ready to hand the keys over to the lenders. At least four potential new tenants are currently negotiating to lease the Manhattan Beach campus, according to Mark Fluent, vice chairman at CBRE Group Inc , who represents Hackman. Lenders are also interested in financing the site, he said.

“We’ve had a lot of interest from tenant prospects for all or part of the campus, and we are engaged in negotiations,” a Hackman spokesman said in a statement.

Whatever the outcome, it’s perhaps telling that the prospective tenants are involved in businesses such as advanced manufacturing, aerospace, 3D printing and data storage.

Southern California will always be a hub for entertainment, said Stephen Cheung, president of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. But it’s also adapting to a world that wants more of its old prowess in defense.

“LA has always gone through transformations,” Cheung said in an interview. “This is one of those.”