The Lot Up the Road: What Netflix Buying Radford Would Mean for Studio City

By Debbie Pisaro Just Studio City — May 4, 2026

If you've driven down Radford Avenue in the last six months, you already know something is up at the lot. The big neon-trimmed signage that for decades read CBS Studio Center, and more recently Radford Studio Center, has been quieter than usual. Lights still on. Trucks still moving. But anyone who has lived in Studio City long enough to read this neighborhood the way you read a familiar face can tell when the energy on a property changes.

This one has been changing for a while. It's about to change a lot more.

According to reporting from The Hollywood Reporter, the Los Angeles Times, and a half-dozen industry trades over the past two weeks, Netflix is in late-stage negotiations to buy the 55-acre Radford Studio Center for somewhere in the neighborhood of $330 million. Goldman Sachs is on the sell side. The deal is described by people close to it as "all but done." It has not yet been announced. As of this writing — Monday, May 4 — neither Netflix nor Goldman Sachs has issued a public confirmation. Hackman Capital Partners, the previous owner, has declined to comment.

So we don't yet have a closed deal. What we do have is a fairly clear picture of where things stand and what it would mean for this neighborhood if it goes through. That picture is worth walking through, because the lot at 4024 Radford has been the single most important piece of real estate in Studio City since before there was a Studio City.

A short history of the lot that named the neighborhood

In May 1928, a silent-film comedy producer named Mack Sennett — the man behind the Keystone Cops, the man who gave Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton their early platforms — opened a brand-new studio on what was then a stretch of San Fernando Valley lettuce fields at Ventura Boulevard and Radford Avenue. The studio was so consequential to the surrounding development that the area around it took on a nickname that stuck: Studio City.

That's not metaphor. That's literally how the neighborhood got its name.

Sennett went bankrupt in the Depression. The lot passed to Mascot Pictures, then Republic Pictures, which spent the 1940s making B-movies and Westerns for Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and a young John Wayne. By the 1950s and '60s, with film giving way to television, CBS leased the property and then bought it outright in 1967 for $9.5 million. The list of shows that came out of those soundstages over the next half-century is staggering: Gunsmoke. Gilligan's Island. The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Bob Newhart. St. Elsewhere. Seinfeld, which built its New York Street backlot on the property in 1994 and shot most of nine seasons on Stage 9. 3rd Rock from the Sun. Will & Grace. Malcolm in the Middle. That '70s Show. Parks and Recreation. Big Brother, which still shoots on Stage 18. The Talk. Entertainment Tonight. SEAL Team.

In 2021, ViacomCBS — now Paramount Skydance — sold the property to Hackman Capital Partners and Square Mile Capital for $1.85 billion, in what was at the time the largest studio real estate transaction in Los Angeles history. Hackman announced ambitious plans for a $1 billion modernization, including new all-electric soundstages, a resurrected Ventura Boulevard entrance at Carpenter Avenue, and a new bridge over the Tujunga Wash at Moorpark that would close a longstanding gap in the LA River Greenway.

That plan ran into the headwinds every Studio City resident has watched: a writers' strike, an actors' strike, runaway production fleeing California for Atlanta and Toronto and London. By January of this year, Hackman had defaulted on a $1.1 billion mortgage. Goldman Sachs took over the property. The first round of bids reportedly came in under $300 million. Netflix didn't participate in that round. It came in later — and apparently, decisively.

Why Netflix is buying

This is where the strategic logic gets interesting, because it tells you something about how Netflix thinks about Los Angeles.

Netflix is famously asset-light. The company has historically rented its production space rather than owning it. Its primary Los Angeles footprint has been a long-term lease at Sunset Bronson Studios in Hollywood, an arrangement with Hudson Pacific Properties that's now nearing the end of its 10-year run. The company also leases stages in Brooklyn, the UK, and Spain, and owns a single major studio campus in Albuquerque plus a $1 billion build-out underway at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey.

Buying Radford would be the first time Netflix owns a major studio property in Los Angeles. Twenty-two soundstages. About 484,000 square feet of production office space. Three backlots — the New York Street, the Central Park area, and the Residential Street. A permanent home in the city where most of its top creative talent already lives.

Read that sentence again. A permanent home in the city where most of its top creative talent already lives. For a neighborhood that has spent the last three years watching production walk out the door, that's a meaningful sentence. It's the kind of long-term commitment Studio City has been quietly worrying about losing.

What it could mean for the neighborhood

I'm not going to pretend I have a crystal ball about a deal that hasn't even been announced. But I live four blocks from this lot, and I've been watching what happens around it for twenty-four years. Here's what I'd be paying attention to in the months ahead.

Employment and traffic. Radford has historically employed thousands of crew members, post-production workers, drivers, caterers, security, and administrative staff — many of whom live in Studio City, Sherman Oaks, Toluca Lake, North Hollywood, and Burbank. A serious Netflix presence would stabilize that workforce. It would also keep Radford Avenue, Colfax Avenue, and Ventura Boulevard as the daily migration corridors they've been for half a century. The traffic doesn't go away. But the rhythm becomes predictable again.

The redevelopment plan. Hackman's billion-dollar Radford Studio Center Plan, approved at the city level in 2024, is the active entitlement attached to this property. A new owner can revise it, accelerate it, or sit on it. The publicly interesting elements — the new Carpenter Avenue gate, the LA River Greenway bridge, the all-electric stages, the preservation of the Mack Sennett Building and Stages 9 and 10 — were the reasons the Studio City Neighborhood Council and the Conservancy supported the plan in the first place. Whether Netflix maintains those community-facing commitments is the single most important local question of this transaction.

The Tujunga Wash bridge in particular. Right now the LA River Greenway, that 51-mile bike and pedestrian path, dead-ends at Radford because there's no crossing of the Tujunga Wash at Moorpark. The Hackman plan included a new bridge that would have closed that gap and let cyclists and pedestrians complete the route. Studio City has wanted that bridge for a generation. If Netflix carries it forward, that's a quiet civic win that no streaming-business reporter will write about — but it changes how the neighborhood works.

The 1928 buildings. Two of the original soundstages on the lot date to Mack Sennett's first year. The Sennett Bungalow is still standing. These structures aren't formal Historic-Cultural Monuments yet, but they are the architectural origin point of the neighborhood. Any owner — Netflix or otherwise — needs to be in conversation with the community about what happens to them. The Brady Bunch House just got HCM-designated for being culturally significant. The literal building that named the city deserves at least the same thought.

The texture of Studio City itself. A studio lot is not a passive land use. It shapes lunch traffic at Aroma and Marie Callender's. It fills the parking lots of Trader Joe's and the Sportsmen's Lodge. It accounts for the steady stream of crew vans on Laurel Canyon at 5 a.m. and the late-night taco runs to Yuca's. It's why we have so many costume shops, prop houses, and dry cleaners that handle wardrobe. A vibrant studio at full operating capacity is the heartbeat of the commercial corridor. A diminished studio would be a slow leak. We've been holding our breath for a couple of years now. A Netflix purchase, if it lands, lets the neighborhood breathe again.

What we don't know

The deal isn't done. The price could move. The terms — what Netflix actually keeps, what gets leased back, what gets redeveloped, what happens to KCBS-TV and KCAL-TV's long-term lease on the broadcast facility — all remain to be reported. The neighborhood is going to learn a lot more in the next few weeks.

What we do know is that the most consequential 55 acres in Studio City is changing hands again, almost a hundred years to the month after Mack Sennett opened the gates. The neighborhood survived every previous owner. It will survive this one too. The question is what shape it takes on the other side.

We'll keep watching. If you have a memory of the lot, a story from working there, or a stake in what happens next, send a note to the address below. We'd like to hear it.

Just Studio City is a neighborhood publication produced by Debbie Pisaro, a Studio City resident. For more on the architectural history of the streets around Radford, explore the Studio City architectural homes map.