Author: rb809rb

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass doesn’t show up for the grand openings of many local businesses. But early Monday morning she trekked all the way out to the northwestern edge of the city, more than 25 miles from City Hall, to attend the ribbon-cutting ceremonies for Cinespace’s new studio complex in Woodland Hills. If there was any doubt as to why she made the effort, she cleared that up when she stepped behind the podium on Stage 1 and greeted the press and other assembled guests with her signature toothy grin.

“When we invest in the [entertainment] industry, the industry invests in Los Angeles, and I think it’s important that we always educate Angelenos to all of the ways the industry impacts our economy, all of the ancillary businesses, and all of the economic growth that happens when industry stays here and films here,” said Bass, who also attended the opening of East End Studios’ new Mission Campus in L.A.’s Arts District back in January.

Built inside the shell of the former headquarters and manufacturing facility for Catalina Yachts, the new 180,000-square-foot Cinespace campus boasts six 18,000-square-foot soundstages with 30-foot clearances, along with 72,000 square feet of production offices and support space. The complex’s first tenant, the thriller “Nightwatching,” starring Mila Kunis, has been shooting on Stages 2 and 3 since early February, and on Monday, the production had also commandeered one of the lunch rooms to rehearse a stunt sequence.

Speaking to Variety following the ribbon-cutting, Cinespace Studios co-CEO Eoin Egan explained that when the company – which also has production campuses in Chicago, Toronto, Atlanta, Wilmington, North Carolina and Germany – began looking for a site in Los Angeles around 2022, it wanted a place where they could establish a turnkey “one-stop shop,” where “we don’t have parking down the street.”

Egan got all that and more. Cinespace Studios Los Angeles is located in a bustling retail district on one of the Valley’s major thoroughfares, Victory Boulevard. Across the street is a mini-mall with tenants that include a deli, a liquor store, a nail salon, a chiropractor and a foot and body massage business. Directly behind the studio is a Home Depot, which “productions are in and out of all the time for everything from gaffer’s tape to toilet paper to lumber,” said Egan, who also noted that crew members regularly patronize the nearby B.J.’s Restaurant & Brewhouse location.

The San Fernando Valley may not be where Hollywood’s cool kids hang out, but despite the confusing constellation of names given to various sections (North Hollywood, Sherman Oaks, Encino, Northridge, etc.), most of it is part of the City of Los Angeles. More importantly, a wealth of talent makes its home on this side of “the hill” (aka, the Santa Monica Mountains), particularly the below-the-line variety.

“Heads of department tend to live here in the West Valley and in [nearby] Studio City, so we’re seeing those synergies and it’s already been an added value,” said Egan.       

The surrounding neighborhood is no stranger to production. Another one of the day’s speakers, L.A. City Councilman Bob Blumenfield, pointed out that Cinespace Studios Los Angeles sits on land that was once part of Warner Ranch, where numerous Westerns were shot back in the ‘30s and ‘40s. More recently, the suburban developments that replaced it in the 1950s onward have served as locations for projects ranging from “Curb Your Enthusiasm” to various Paul Thomas Anderson movies, including 2021’s “Licorice Pizza.” The facilities are also about two miles northwest of the former site of the RKO Encino Ranch – sold in 1954 and redeveloped, primarily as the Encino Village subdivision of mid-century modern tract homes – where downtown Bedford Falls was constructed for 1946’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

But building a studio complex is a risky proposition. When Cinespace embarked on the project, the industry was in the midst of a post-pandemic, peak-streaming production boom. Since then, there’s been a major contraction, exacerbated by dual WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023, followed by renegotiated IATSE and Teamster contracts in 2024 that spurred more projects to shoot outside the U.S.

That lent added urgency to the lobbying efforts mounted by Cinespace and other industry players in support of California’s Film and Television Tax Credit Program 4.0, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law in July 2025. It raised the annual cap on the incentive from $330 million to $750 million and bumped the base tax credit from 20%-25% on qualified expenditures to 35%-40%. It also made it fully refundable for the first time, enabling companies to get cash back from California if their credit exceeds their state tax burden. The initial results were positive: As of January 2026, 119 projects (39 television and 80 feature film) had been approved under the revised program, which are estimated to produce 25,000 crew hires and $4.1 billion in economic activity.

Bass also did her part, issuing an executive directive in May 2025 dubbed “Reel Change: Supporting Local Film and Television Production,” ordering city departments to take a proactive film-friendly approach to production and make iconic locations like Griffith Observatory and the Central Library more accessible and affordable for filming.

Despite these improvements, success is far from assured. According to the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation’s 2026 Annual Economic Forecast released last month, sound stage occupancy hovered above 93% between 2016 and 2021, but by 2024 it had dipped to 63%. Meanwhile, sound stage square footage grew by 53% between 2020 and 2025.  

But California Film Commission executive director Colleen Bell struck a positive note when she spoke to Variety on Monday.

“When a project is accepted into [California’s incentive] program, they have 180 days to start principal photography, so you’re not going to see an instant spike,” said Bell, who also addressed the crowd at the event. “There’s a gradual increase of production taking place, so stages will start to fill up slowly, but it’s happening.”

Superstars don’t stay relevant by doing what people expect, or even what their fans necessarily want. Crowd-pleasing is a fast track to becoming a nostalgia act, where an artist is trapped in a loop of playing to type (i.e. the hits and only the hits) year after year. It’s not a bad life — Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Elton John and countless others are making millions playing their decades-old hits to adoring, affluent, increasingly older crowds, with new songs being an indulgence for them and a bathroom break for the fans.

But staying culturally relevant is a totally different game, one that requires a constant element of surprise, or at least the unexpected — a sense that the artist knows exactly what they’re doing, even if they’re not obvious about it. That combination of engagement and elusiveness, of knowing how much to say and how much to hold back, creates a tantalizing sense of mystery that keeps people curious, not only wanting more but wanting to know more.

That elusiveness is a big part of what keeps us engaged with the Beyoncés, Arianas, Lanas, Taylors and Kendricks of the world — not knowing what’s coming next, the anticipation of getting something unexpected and exciting, because what’s more exciting than getting something awesome that you didn’t even know you wanted? Of course, countless artists have tried to lead their audience into places the fans knew they didn’t want to go, and faceplanted accordingly. But the risk is also a big part of the reward — even if it can lead to some ambivalent reactions to one’s dancing ability.

Without putting Harry Styles in the same league as some of the above innovators, he has shown an unusually strong self-awareness in terms of his career, his audience and simply keeping people interested. After six years with One Direction, one of the biggest boy bands in history, his 2017 self-titled solo debut sounded like absolutely nothing he’d done before — not to mention nothing else on the charts — and gave him a clean slate from which he could go anywhere, yet “Fine Line” two years later found him shifting into the upbeat pop that fans probably expected from his debut. And although 2022’s “Harry’s House” continued in that musical vein, it arrived surprisingly quickly after the pandemic-delayed “Fine Line” tour, and basically made for a multi-year — and multimillion-dollar-spinning — extended album cycle.

So what’s the move with the fascinatingly punctuated “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.,” which comes out on Friday? Not what the title, or Styles’ stated inspirations from Berlin nightclubs, would lead people to expect, because there’s very little here that anyone would consider disco (albeit with one glorious exception we’ll get to in a moment).

There are a lot of upbeat songs, big drums, heavy bass and loud electronic noises to go with Styles’ alternately cheery or melancholy melodies, but the beats on this album tend to pound rather than groove; even the upbeat and promisingly titled “Ready Steady Go” stomps more than it swings. Throughout most of the album, there’s a sense of restraint, of holding back — even the songs with the heaviest beats would be almost impossible to dance to. There are lots of electronics, few guitars, and one song, “Coming Up Roses,” is a lovely ballad with Styles accompanied only by a piano and orchestra.

But in line with the sense of mystery and elusiveness mentioned above, it’s an album that reveals itself gradually, and there’s plenty for fans to grab onto. The shimmering pop songs “Taste Back” and “The Waiting Game” have the album’s sweetest melodies; “Pop” is driven by a Daft Punk-esque arpeggiated synthesizer hook; the closing “Carla’s Song” is the kind of track that could be an exuberant, set-closing, confetti-dropping finale in a more concert-friendly arrangement. Oddly, the memorably titled “Season 2 Weight Loss” is one of the least memorable songs.

Even more oddly, the one true banger — “Dance No More” — is the outlier in the batch. With a funky groove, ‘80s synthesizer stabs, party noises and a put-your-hands-in-the-air-wooo! chorus of “DJs don’t dance no more!,” it has a loose, fun, carefree vibe found nowhere else on the album. It’s a prime early candidate for Song of the Summer 2026 — and, perfectly on brand for this album, it’s sequenced way toward the end, the tenth of 12 songs (maybe to manage expectations?), and is followed by the slow, acoustic-guitar-led ballad “Paint by Numbers,” squelching the party vibe just as it was getting a late start.  

Initially, fans may greet this album with confusion or hesitant enthusiasm, because it may not be what they were dreaming of or expecting. But do we really want the same birthday present every year? “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.” is actually the opposite of its opponent in pop’s 2026 heated rivalry: the new Bruno Mars album, which delivers — immediately, and on a silver platter — exactly what a majority of his fans presumably wanted. Styles could have done that easily — you can almost feel him not doing it, with the restrained vibe of many of the songs on this album — but artistically, he might be trying to play a longer game with songs that take some time to sink in.

However, his concerts are a different story — a musical group hug, filled with hits and sparkle and laughs and unselfconscious joyful dancing, and many of his songs often take on a different life onstage, where the heat and grit of a live band let them loosen up and swing. That will probably happen with a lot of the tracks here too — witness (in the unlikely event that anyone reading this hasn’t already) his performance of “Aperture” at the Brit Awards last weekend, which saw the low-key song transformed into an anthem.

So even if a lot of the songs on “Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.” are a bit on the chill side, they almost definitely won’t be when he hits the stage. We’ll get to find out on Friday, when a one-off concert in England will be livestreamed in advance of the tour starting in earnest in May.