In August 2024, Great Point Studios unveiled this $50 million-plus studio complex on Niagara Street that includes three sound stages and enough offices, dressing rooms and production space to house an ongoing series of film projects. Robert Halmi Jr., CEO of Great Point Studios, is the former president and CEO of Hallmark Entertainment and the founder of the Hallmark Channel. “Halmi pretty much invented the holiday movie genre,” his publicist Daniela Sapkar pointed out while guiding visitors on a tour of the Buffalo studio.
Buffalo can be a small town, an old town and, in some ways, any town. Filmmakers have appreciated that flexibility. “We have such a vast array of things here, from airports to subways to something like the Broadway Market or a vacant church,” Tim Clark, commissioner of the Buffalo Niagara Film Office, said. “They lend themselves very well to the camera.”
Buffalo’s diversity of architecture, bridges, waterways and weather has appealed to dozens of filmmakers. Barry Levinson shot “The Natural” here in 1983, turning Buffalo into old-time New York City. In more recent years, producer Jonathan Sanger has substituted Buffalo for 1940s Connecticut in “Marshall,” and for a late-1800s lower Manhattan neighborhood in “Cabrini.” Director Guillermo del Toro embraced Buffalo’s art deco City Hall in “Nightmare Alley,” and John Krasinski turned Western New York into a dystopian small-town America in “A Quiet Place: Part II.”
Halmi’s goal was to build all-in-one studio spaces in major markets including New York City allowing filmmakers to tap into New York State tax breaks. From a strategic perspective, Buffalo is considered an extension of that New York footprint giving filmmakers the opportunity to take advantage of an extra 10% tax credit for shooting upstate, which can bring the full benefit to 40%.
While the Yonkers complex is massive, with 18 soundstages set across four campuses, the Buffalo site is comparatively tighter – but hardly small. It is on a former manufacturing site across from the food company Rich Products’ world headquarters. The biggest of the three soundstages is 20,000 square feet, which is a bit larger than an NHL rink and less than half the size of an NFL field. The other two soundstages are each 5,000 square feet.
“Now that we have Buffalo open, there are going to be a lot of times when we say, ‘This show doesn’t need to be in Yonkers. It needs to be in Buffalo. You’re going to get extra tax credits. The crew is cheaper. You’ve got the locations right here. The crew base is here. Buffalo makes more sense.’”
To shape Great Point’s approach, Halmi and his team analyzed more than 100 TV movie scripts to find commonalities. They identified the most frequently used sets – a living room, kitchen, bedroom, storefront, and so on – and planned soundstages large enough to fit those. They identified the average number of actors, money spent on locations, how many people are fed each day, the number of days typically needed to complete a film, and more.
The “black box” soundstages were constructed of long-span bar joists supported by Fabcon insulated precast wall panels. Each space includes sophisticated acoustic and environmental controls to support any range of set construction, lighting, and film/video needs. The studios are surrounded by a two-story steel frame building housing creative and administrative support spaces, including actor dressing and makeup rooms, costume design and fabrication, set design workshop and storage, lighting and camera rooms, and offices for script development, accounting, and production management. A production lot south of the building will be used for parking, film and stage equipment trucks serving the studio, and for outdoor filming.
