Stage space in Texas, honestly.

You have a stage-heavy show and a Texas grant in the budget (the plain-English explainer if you're new to it). You've heard there's a stage shortage and you've heard there's a 450,000-square-foot campus in Fort Worth, and both are true. Here is what actually exists, who runs it, and what is still a rendering, with no rates, because facilities quote their own.

Austin.

Austin Studios. The Austin Film Society runs it with the City of Austin on 20 acres at the old Mueller airport. Three sound stages, per the Austin Film Commission's facility list: 12,525, 16,599 and 13,775 square feet, with ceilings from 22 to 29 feet, plus mill, warehouse and office space and the Creative Media Center suites. I've walked it more than once. It is vast, versatile and in exactly the right place, and the staff are the kindest and most knowledgeable people you'll meet on a lot. It was built with filmmakers in mind and it shows in every hallway.

ATX Film Studios. Six stages from 4,000 to 27,500 square feet, a 135,000-square-foot Studio 6, a five-acre backlot, eight minutes from the airport, operating since 2010, per the operator's own site. Their credits list The Leftovers, Fear the Walking Dead and Spy Kids: Armageddon. The Film Commission lists the complex at 237,000 square feet; the operator's per-stage numbers add up to a little less. Ask which number you're renting.

Troublemaker Studios. Robert Rodriguez's lot on Old Manor Road: 14,000 and 10,000-square-foot stages and a city backlot, established 2001, per the studio. It's also where Rodriguez's Brass Knuckle Films launched during SXSW, and where the label threw its second SXSW party this March, per TheWrap. A working lot with a party budget is a good sign.

One more Austin note for the production office. Austin Studios' Creative Media Center, the converted Armory building, holds roughly 15,000 to 17,000 square feet of leasable office in private suites, per the Film Society's own pages, which disagree with each other by a couple thousand feet. If your office needs to be on a lot with the stages, that is the lot.

North Texas.

SGS Studios at AllianceTexas, Fort Worth. 450,000 square feet across two converted buildings, built to run four productions at once, active since March 2025 when Landman season two moved in, per Hillwood's release. The Hollywood Reporter counted six soundstages; Hillwood's own release doesn't give a number. Hillwood says it is planning a second site nearby that could add eight more stages and another 300,000 square feet. I've been inside. It's a unique space. It also opened with Taylor Sheridan's shows and, by the operator's own account, has been filled by them since: Landman, then The Madison and Lioness, then Rio Palo, per the Star-Telegram piece Hillwood reposted. Budget around it only if you're one of them.

Camp Hoblitzelle, Midlothian. A Salvation Army camp where The Chosen built a 30,000-square-foot soundstage with sixteen inches of insulation and a permanent Capernaum village, per the Salvation Army's release from the ribbon-cutting. Great staff. Whether it takes outside productions once The Chosen wraps its final season there is the question worth a phone call, and I'd make it early.

Southside Studios, Dallas. Cinelease operates three stages totaling 44,000 square feet with 76,000 square feet of mill and flex space, two miles from downtown, per Cinelease and the Dallas Film Commission. The one on this list most people outside Texas have never heard of, and the one most likely to have a date open.

Houston, San Antonio, El Paso.

I could not find an operating soundstage of 10,000 square feet or more with its own operator page in any of the three. San Antonio's Cine Studio project says as much about its own city. If you know one, tell me and I'll add it. Until then, a stage-heavy show in those cities is building or importing.

What's coming, and what's a rendering.

204 Texas, Bastrop. Alton Butler's Line 204 broke ground April 6 on nearly 600 acres west of Lovers Lane: six 20,000-square-foot studios, two 10,000-square-foot stages, a 50,000-square-foot warehouse with mill space, per Community Impact. Earlier timelines called for opening in 2025 and slipped. No opening date is published. I've only toured it online, and so has everyone else.

Hill Country Studios, San Marcos. Seventy-five acres and twelve stages planned, per the developer's site. KSAT reported in February 2025 that the site was an empty lot with a utility problem. Developing, in the sense that a screenplay is developing.

Super Studios USA, Mansfield. About 81,000 square feet of stages and offices, filed with the state in April 2026 with construction tentatively this fall, per ConstructConnect. A filing, not a stage.

Wyldwood, Bastrop. A production company for now, by its founder's own account.

What I ask when I walk one.

A square-footage number tells you almost nothing. When I walk a stage in Texas, I'm asking the same six questions every time, and the answers are what go in the schedule.

• Ceiling and grid. Twenty-two feet and twenty-nine feet are different stages for a lighting department, and the Austin Film Commission's list gives you both numbers for Austin Studios for a reason.

• Power. House power or generators on the pad, and where the pad is relative to the dock.

• Load-in. Dock height, door width, and whether a set can come in built or has to come in flat.

• Parking and base camp. Where the trucks live, and whether the lot is yours or shared with the tenant next door.

• The neighbor. What's on the other side of the wall and what time they start. A stage next to a working mill is a stage with a schedule.

• The drive. From crew housing, in traffic, at call time. In Austin that number changes by an hour depending on which side of the river you sleep on.
  

None of those are on a listing page. All of them decide whether a stage day costs what the budget says it costs. The facilities above will answer every one of them if you ask; most producers don't, because they're asking about the rate.

The honest part.

Does Texas have a stage problem or a stage-marketing problem? Both. The inventory that exists is Austin, Fort Worth and Dallas, and the biggest single facility is spoken for. That's the stage problem. The marketing problem is that nobody outside Texas can name Austin Studios or Southside, and both are real, staffed and open. More space is coming. Until it's open, it isn't, and I won't put it in a schedule.

The other thing nobody puts in a brochure: the state itself is the stage. If your show can live outside, Texas has time-capsule houses and whole neighborhoods to go with them, a river through the middle of its capital, and a horizon that doesn't end. Half of what people build on a stage elsewhere is standing here already. Where Texas doubles is the longer version of that argument.

Rates aren't on this page and won't be. Call the facility. Or call us and we'll tell you which two to call for your dates, which is part of what a producer of record does here.