Austin Studios

Austin Studios occupies 20 acres of the former Robert Mueller Municipal Airport in central Austin, where the Austin Film Society runs aircraft hangars and other airport buildings as film stages on behalf of the City of Austin. The facility dates its founding to 2000. That spring Robert Rodriguez was already using soundstages at the old Mueller airport for Spy Kids, which shot from March 20 to June 7, 2000, and Donald Petrie's Miss Congeniality, with Sandra Bullock, followed from May to July 2000. By early 2004 the Austin Chronicle described the studios as a collaboration between the city and the film society, with five hangars for film work, an office building for production headquarters and two long T-hangars rented to film-support businesses. Its list of features made there in the first four years included The New Guy, Disney's The Rookie, Alan Parker's The Life of David Gale, the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the Texas scenes of Spike Lee's 25th Hour, Tim McCanlies's Secondhand Lions, Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, The Wendell Baker Story and Peter Berg's Friday Night Lights, which was shooting there that spring. Later productions included The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning and Bandslam. The society's own brochure lists Grindhouse, Machete, Predators, the 2010 True Grit, Boyhood and Alita: Battle Angel among the films, and Friday Night Lights, The Lying Game, From Dusk Till Dawn, Panic and Walker among the television series. The Walker reboot with Jared Padalecki, which premiered in January 2021, was filming out of Austin Studios. Today the complex has two soundstages, five flex stages used for filming, mill and wardrobe work, a jail set and a country-western bar set, plus production offices. Stage 5 has a 19,200-square-foot film area. With $5.4 million from the city's 2012 bond program, the society converted a former armory building into the Creative Media Center, with about 15,000 square feet of offices, and added the adjoining 13,775-square-foot Stage 7. Tenants include Detour Filmproduction, Rooster Teeth Productions, MPS Camera and Lighting and several casting offices, and the Austin Film Society keeps its main office on the lot.