Turning an unwanted car assembly plant into a sound stage for a household-name movie studio sounds like the last option up for consideration but that is likely to happen in Michigan.
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Both state and studio officials have confirmed that executives of Burbank, California-based Warner Brothers – think Saturday morning and cartoon ‘shorts’ (if you’re old enough) plus numerous blockbuster movies including Harry Potter – have visited Ford’s idled assembly plant in Wixom.
Production ended there in June last year with the completion of the final Lincoln Town Car. Wixom opened in 1957 as the Lincoln Assembly Plant and produced 6.6m vehicles in 50 years of operation.
Production of the Town Car moved to the Saint Thomas Assembly Plant in Ontario, Canada. Wixom was one of 16 Ford facilities to be idled under the company’s ‘Way Forward’ plan to return North American automotive operations to profit and at least 1,100 workers lost their jobs.
But the plant may get a new lease of life. Warner Brothers spokesman Scott Rowe told a Detroit newspaper the studio was in the “exploratory stage at this point,” adding that “as a matter of practice, we are consistently scouting out places all over the world.”
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By GlobalDataWarner may be looking to build a new studio, with the Wixom Ford plant being one option, Rowe reportedly confirmed.
“We thought that there might be a good opportunity to take a big facility and see if we could turn it into a studio,” Rowe said. “Studios do things like that all the time.”
He noted that Warners’ smash-hit Harry Potter films were shot in an old air base in England with large hangars.
The paper said state governor Jennifer Granholm was pushing Michigan as a destination for major moviemakers, offering incentives worth up to 42% of production costs incurred in the state.
There have been numerous reports in recent years of moviemakers now preferring other locations to California, where Hollywood and its surroundings were once film-shoot central, for a variety of reasons including rising costs and logistics problems.
But major studios such as Warner’s and Universal are still based there, and both retain huge lots where movies are shot on multiple sound stages and outdoor sets.
Granholm has offered Wixom’s old Ford plant as one location of interest.
“This is all preliminary now,” Tony Wenson, chief operating officer of the Michigan Film Office, told the paper of Warner Bros’ interest. “They’re doing their own due diligence on the viability. … We’re focusing on bringing them in.”
It was at least the second visit from the studio, the report said, adding that Wixom’s city manager had also confirmed that Warner Brothers toured the plant several months ago.
Earlier this summer, outside interest in the plant was high, he added, but it has since dropped off.
