Britain built too
many film studios

The UK just posted its biggest film production year on record. And the studios are talking about breathing space. Both of those things are true, and the gap between them is the best news brand film has had since 2019.

Everyone reports the headline. Almost nobody reads the shape of it.

In February the BFI published the official numbers. Film and high-end TV production spend in the UK hit £6.8 billion in 2025, up 22% on 2024. Feature film alone contributed £2.77 billion from 193 productions, the highest annual spend on record. High-end TV took £4.03 billion. On paper, a boom.

Now read the second line. Inward investment films and shows delivered £5.8 billion of that. Eighty five percent. And domestic UK film, the stuff actually owned here, accounted for £193 million. Out of £2.77 billion.

01A record year that belongs to someone else

Britain is the best film set in the world. It is not the best place to own a film.

The spend is up and the number of productions is not. Bigger cheques, fewer of them, mostly written abroad. Wuthering Heights. Avengers. Harry Potter. Bridgerton. Slow Horses. Enormous machines, parked on our stages, employing our crews, and taking the asset home with them when they wrap.

That is a good business. It built an infrastructure that almost no other country can match. It is just not the same thing as a healthy domestic industry, and everyone inside it knows the difference.

02The middle fell out

Here is the bit that matters to anyone who makes things for a living.

Emily Stillman at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden put it plainly in Televisual's studios report this spring. Budgets are tighter, decisions come later, and production is now either the massive tentpole world or the very low budget world. The mid budget, she says, is a lighter area than it used to be.

Pinewood's chief executive David Conway called the streamer wars long behind us and said demand has normalised into a long-term curve. Studio development has slowed. Some in the sector now think the UK has too much space.

Read that again. Too much space. Four years ago you could not get a stage in this country for love or money. Producers were booking Bulgaria because Britain was full.

The BFI's first quarter of 2026 says the same thing quietly. Film and high-end TV spend came in at £1.5 billion, down from £1.6 billion in the same quarter last year. Not a collapse. A settling.

03Slack is not a crisis. It is a door.

When a machine this good has slack in it, somebody gets to walk in.

The crews are the same crews. The stages are the same stages. The kit is the same kit. The gaffer who lit a Marvel picture last year is available this year, and the studio that would not return a commercial producer's call in 2022 is answering the phone in 2026. Garden Studios in west London saw enquiries jump 21% in the second half of last year against the first. Somebody is knocking.

And the economics stopped fighting you. The 2023 business rates hike that quadrupled some studios' bills has been largely unwound, with 40% relief now locked in for ten years. The independent film tax credit is pulling low budget features back into the system. The floor under British production is firmer than it has been in a decade, at exactly the moment the ceiling has room in it.

The hole in the market is the mid budget. Not a hundred million. Not a phone in a car park. The middle. Which, if you have ever commissioned a brand film, a launch campaign, a documentary series or a proper set-built shoot, is precisely where your money lives.

04What we would do with the window

Book the craft, not the format. The reason to make something on a stage with a real crew is not that it looks expensive. It is that it looks like a decision. AI can generate a passable moving image for the price of a coffee, and it will keep getting better. What it cannot do is make a room full of specialists commit to one idea and execute it with intent. That is what an audience feels, even when they cannot name it.

Ask for the crew, not the quote. In a soft market you are not just buying days, you are buying access. Ask who is actually on the truck. The people coming off tentpoles are reachable now in a way they were not three years ago.

Move while it is soft. Slack does not last. Wootton at the British Film Commission says the UK is doing significantly better on inward investment than pretty much anywhere in the world. When the next commissioning surge lands, and it will, the stages fill and the good crews vanish back into eight month shoots. The window is open now. It closes on someone else's schedule, not yours.

Britain overbuilt. Britain built world-class production capacity on the assumption the streamers would never stop spending, and then the streamers stopped. What is left is a country full of brilliant people and empty stages, briefly, cheaply, waiting.

Overbuilt is only a problem if you are the one who built it. If you are the one turning up with an idea, it is a gift.