Tom Avison is just back from Los Angeles when I meet him at Perth Film Studios on a warm May morning. The studio’s inaugural chief executive was on a whirlwind sales trip, squeezing “about 16 or 17 meetings” into four days with the likes of Netflix, Universal, Warner Bros and Disney. “Basically any production company that you can think of,” he says. “They want to know what’s going on.”
Back at the major new facility in Whiteman, on Perth’s semi-rural north-eastern fringe, the British screen executive is in tour guide mode: affable, brisk, fluent in the strange mix of logistics and optimism required to launch a studio from scratch. Before Perth, Avison helped open Sky Studios Elstree outside London, a major production base that launched with Wicked and later hosted Jurassic World and Bridget Jones. But the Perth role – which he discovered, almost improbably, via LinkedIn – “hooked” him because it offered the chance to shape not just a facility, but an industry still defining itself.
“Not long ago, this was just a cow paddock,” he says wryly, as he walks me through the 16-hectare site. Over the past three years, the paddock has been remade into a world-class film studio: four vast sound stages, production offices, workshops, service roads and a backlot larger than the playing field at Perth’s 60,000-seat Optus Stadium.
The build alone cost $233.5m, funded by state taxpayers, who are committing a further $57m to support the studio’s first decade of operation: a major public investment aimed at lifting Western Australia’s share of scripted screen production from 1% to 10% over the next decade. The wager comes as Australia is drawing in more international screen projects: drama production expenditure was $2.7bn in 2024-25, up 43% on the previous year. For Avison, the challenge is to put Perth “in the same conversation” as the established east coast production hubs – and make the case for WA more broadly.
That case, he says, is both financial and geographical: WA can stack its own production incentive with the federal location offset, a tax rebate designed to lure film and television projects to Australia, with further support for regional shoots. From a location perspective, Avison sees “a tremendous amount of untapped opportunity”: WA has rarely been used by bigger productions, despite the cinematic range of its south-west forests, Wheatbelt, Kimberley, the Pinnacles and “red dirt into a blue sea”.
In one of the studio’s sound stages, work is already under way. When I visit, Two Birds, a six-part Stan and ITV mystery-thriller starring Judy Davis, Sheridan Smith and Stephen Peacocke, is in its first week of production. Props and furniture are being readied for interiors; nearby, completed sets sit ready for filming. The series, which is also filming on location in Kalgoorlie, is employing more than 100 local cast and crew and expected to inject over $17m into the WA economy.
For those expecting the studio to open with a Hollywood blockbuster, Two Birds may look like a modest beginning. But for Avison it is part of the slower work of building credibility. “Melbourne’s had a film studio for 20 years, Sydney for 30 years, Queensland for 40 years,” he says. “We’re four months into a film studio here.” The aim, he argues, is to grow the industry without pushing it beyond what it can sustain: “We want to stretch the muscle. We don’t want to tear it.”
Beyond the studio gates, there is another sign of momentum. Breakers, the first Netflix series to film in WA and billed as the state’s biggest production to date, is shooting in Busselton and along the south-west coast. It is not a Perth Film Studios win, but alongside Two Birds it is “the biggest concurrent production that’s gone on in WA, I think, ever”, Avison says.
WA’s pitch to the world comes after years of exodus from Hollywood. Los Angeles’ share of overall worldwide production in film and television has been falling for years, as California has been forced to compete with domestic and international jurisdictions offering lower production costs and competitive financial incentives. Entertainment data company Luminate found that the share of US scripted series made in LA fell from 40% in 2019 to less than 25% in early 2026. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has said the state’s entertainment industry is now “on life support”.
Analysis commissioned this year by Screen Australia found Australia is globally trusted as a production hub, but warned the sector “remains constrained by feast and famine cycles”; production peaks are stretching the limited pool of experienced crew, which drives up costs and creates scheduling conflicts.
Two Birds offers an early test case: the British-Australian co-production, led by the WA producer Martha Coleman, has a majority WA crew supplemented by interstate and UK practitioners where personnel were not available locally, including an east coast line producer, best boy/rigging gaffer and key grip.
Avison says WA lacks trained personnel and specialised equipment in some fields, such as stunts, special effects, construction, grips and, to some extent, rigging and lighting, because productions of this scale have rarely filmed here before. Screenwest is trying to fill some of those gaps through targeted industry-capacity funding and workforce training.
Matthew Deaner, the chief executive of Screen Producers Australia, says that while Perth Film Studios is an important investment, “a studio alone does not create a sustainable screen industry”; the real measure of success is “not simply the productions attracted, but the capability left behind”. Returning series built around local stories and IP, he says, are what tend to stabilise a sector “for years to come”.
Kate Separovich, a WA producer and co-founder of Lake Martin Films, is “cautiously optimistic” about Perth Film Studios, but says larger productions can put pressure on independent producers already trying to finance local work, and absorb the crews which smaller productions depend on. “If a bigger production comes in and takes all the local crew, then I can’t afford to fly people in from interstate or overseas,” she says. “As a producer, I’m like, but where are the crew when I want to make something?”
If crew depth is one test of Perth’s ambitions, distance is another. “The challenge of being in Perth is always our distance,” Separovich says. “It’s 20-plus hours to get from LA to Perth.” But Avison argues distance looks different inside the global production circuit: creative talent already moves between hubs such as LA, London, Sydney and Cape Town, while Perth’s direct (17-hour) connection to London will appeal to UK productions.
Back at Perth Film Studios, Avison is still making his case. As we continue around the studio, he points out some quieter aspects of its design: a yarning circle, hundreds of thousands of native plants and, at the rear, an open field visited by grazing kangaroos. “In the UK, film studios are big grey boxes and loads of parking,” he says. “Here, we don’t want it just to be that.” The softer edges sit alongside a more technical ambition: stages built for traditional shoots as well as virtual production, real-time rendering and AI-assisted workflows. A studio, he adds, needs to be “kind of eternally flexible”.
His hope is that Perth Film Studios gives WA’s screen industry a centre of gravity. At one point, he compares the studio to “an artificial reef” – a piece of infrastructure meant “to help establish and grow an ecosystem”. He hopes it not only attracts the big projects, but small ones too, “because they all feed off each other”. Whether that ecosystem will justify WA’s $290m investment remains to be seen.
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