Hackman Capital Built an Empire on the Streaming Boom. Now Its Biggest Bets Are Breaking.
Four publicly reported acquisition prices total about $3.4 billion, while Kaufman Astoria’s purchase price has not been publicly established. One comparable Hackman studio deal survived. The difference helps explain where the strategy broke.
In December 2021, Michael Hackman offered a remarkably confident description of the studio real-estate market.
“In every market where we open, demand has exceeded the supply,” he said.
At the time, the logic was easy to understand. Streaming companies were spending heavily on original programming, production was expanding, and purpose-built studios looked increasingly scarce. Hackman Capital Partners was buying aggressively, building a portfolio of production facilities across Los Angeles and New York.
The company was not merely betting on Hollywood production. It was buying the real estate that production companies would need.
Then the market changed.
Production slowed. The 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes disrupted the industry. Streaming companies pulled back on spending. Production moved toward cheaper jurisdictions with stronger incentives. And studio occupancy in Los Angeles fell sharply from the unusually strong levels of the previous cycle.
The financial consequences are now visible across several of Hackman’s largest studio investments.
Radford Studio Center went into default and lenders took control. Television City entered a forced-sale process. Manhattan Beach Studios defaulted on its debt. A former Sony Pictures Animation campus acquired by Hackman was sold through foreclosure at a steep discount. Kaufman Astoria became the subject of a foreclosure action.
Silvercup Studios, another major Hackman studio investment from roughly the same expansion era, refinanced its debt in 2025.
That distinction matters.
The story is not simply that Hackman bought expensive studios and then Hollywood got weaker. The more revealing story is what happened when large acquisitions made during the industry's expansion were paired with financing obligations that could not fall as quickly as production demand did.
The bets made at the top of the cycle
Hackman’s expansion accelerated as investors increasingly treated studio real estate as a scarce strategic asset.
In 2020, Blackstone partnered with Hudson Pacific Properties on a Hollywood media portfolio valued at about $1.65 billion. The portfolio contained roughly 2.2 million square feet across studios and adjacent office properties.
Hackman was pursuing a similar thesis on a different scale.
By late 2021, the company said it had 16 studios and expected to reach 19. It said its studio assets exceeded $10 billion and described demand as stronger than available supply.
The timing is important.
Some of Hackman’s biggest acquisitions were made in or around this period, when the economics of production real estate looked unusually favorable.
The problem was that the assets were not being purchased with the expectation that Hollywood would remain permanently at peak demand.
They were purchased into a market where continued demand growth made high valuations and large financing commitments appear more supportable.
When the operating environment changed, the debt did not automatically change with it.
Radford: the clearest break
The most dramatic example is Radford Studio Center in Studio City.
Hackman Capital and Square Mile Capital, now part of Affinius Capital, acquired Radford in 2021 for approximately $1.85 billion.
The property carried roughly $1.1 billion of mortgage debt.
By January 2026, Radford was in default. Goldman Sachs and other lenders took control of the property.
The scale of the reversal is striking.
A property purchased for $1.85 billion with more than $1 billion of debt was suddenly being discussed in the context of a sale for a fraction of its earlier valuation.
Netflix was under contract to buy Radford for a price close to $400 million, according to reporting published June 19, 2026. The transaction was expected to close in the third quarter, meaning the reported sale had not yet closed at that point.
That would represent an enormous change in value from the 2021 acquisition.
And the operating data helps explain why.
Radford was about 71% leased as of March 2026. Earlier reporting found that, as of June 2025, revenue covered only about 21% of the property's debt-service requirement.
Those are not simply valuation problems.
They show the interaction between a physical asset, its operating revenue and the financing attached to it.
If a studio produces less revenue than expected while carrying a large fixed debt obligation, falling occupancy can become a financing problem rather than merely a leasing problem.
Television City: another large acquisition under pressure
Television City tells a similar story from another part of Hackman’s portfolio.
Hackman acquired the historic Los Angeles studio complex in 2019 for about $750 million.
By 2026, Deutsche Bank-led lenders were pursuing a forced sale after the property fell into distress. Reporting put the lenders’ claims at more than $357 million.
Television City is not Radford. Its financing structure and operating history are different.
But the financial pressure is familiar: a large studio property acquired during a period of strong expectations later faced weaker production economics and a more difficult financing environment.
The significance becomes clearer when Television City is viewed alongside the other distressed properties.
This was not one isolated building experiencing an idiosyncratic problem.
Several major studio assets acquired during Hackman’s expansion were simultaneously encountering financial stress.
Manhattan Beach: the $650 million number needs a warning label
Manhattan Beach Studios is another important piece of the puzzle, but the headline transaction number requires precision.
In 2019, Hackman announced a $650 million transaction involving MBS Group.
That transaction included the MBS Media Campus and MBS Services, so $650 million should not be treated as a clean purchase price for the real estate alone.
The real estate was acquired through a joint venture involving Hackman and Square Mile Capital.
The property later carried roughly $258 million of debt. By 2026, the debt was in default and lenders had begun moving toward enforcement.
This is exactly the kind of distinction that matters in reconstructing a distressed real-estate portfolio.
The public record can show transaction values and debt balances. It does not necessarily reveal how the sponsor internally valued every component, how much equity was contributed, what capex assumptions were used, or what return was expected from each part of a transaction.
Those unknowns should remain unknown.
But the debt exposure itself is public.
And once the property's operating performance deteriorated, the financing became a much harder burden to carry.
The former Sony campus: the loss became visible in the sale price
The former Sony Pictures Animation campus at 9050 Washington Blvd. in Culver City provides another important data point.
Hackman and Square Mile acquired the property in 2021 for approximately $160 million.
The property subsequently encountered financing trouble.
Then the market produced a much harder piece of evidence.
In September 2026, CoStar reported that Fortress Investment Group acquired the campus through a foreclosure auction at a price roughly 57% below the 2021 sale price.
That is not an estimate of Hackman’s total investment loss.
The equity invested, financing costs, capital expenditures, transaction costs and any other recoveries are not fully public.
But the transaction establishes something concrete: the property changed hands through foreclosure at a price dramatically below its previous acquisition level.
That is the kind of evidence that turns a theory about distress into an observable change in asset value.
Kaufman Astoria: another leveraged studio deal enters foreclosure
In New York, Kaufman Astoria Studios became another major point of pressure.
Hackman and Affinius were involved in the property, which carried a $340 million loan.
Deutsche Bank later pursued foreclosure, with reporting putting the amount claimed at more than $359 million as of March 2026 after including principal, accrued interest and other charges.
The purchase price of the property itself is not sufficiently established in the public record to include it in a clean reconstruction of Hackman’s acquisition spending.
That matters because adding every large-looking number together would create a false sense of precision.
The defensible conclusion is narrower.
Kaufman Astoria was another major Hackman studio asset carrying substantial financing that entered a foreclosure process during the same broader industry downturn.
This was not a random collection of bad investments
Viewed separately, each property has its own explanation.
Viewed together, a pattern becomes visible.
Radford.
Television City.
Manhattan Beach.
The former Sony campus.
Kaufman Astoria.
Several of the largest studio investments made during Hackman’s expansion encountered financial trouble after the production environment weakened.
That does not prove that every acquisition was badly underwritten.
It does not prove that Hackman made the same mistake on every property.
And it does not prove that the studio thesis itself was wrong.
What the evidence does show is that a large acquisition made during a high-demand period becomes vulnerable when three things happen at once:
The debt is substantial.
The revenue supporting that debt weakens.
That is the common financial pressure visible across the troubled assets.
The debt mattered because revenue could not move with it
This is the central financial mechanism.
A studio is an operating asset.
Its value depends partly on what the property can earn from production tenants and related activity. But debt service is governed by the financing agreement.
If production volume falls, the property's revenue can fall.
The mortgage does not automatically shrink because Hollywood is producing fewer shows.
That creates a gap.
At Radford, the public numbers make that gap unusually visible. Revenue reportedly covered only about 21% of required debt service as of June 2025.
The exact underwriting assumptions behind each Hackman acquisition are not public.
So it would be wrong to claim that the company assumed a particular occupancy rate, production volume or rent-growth trajectory without evidence.
But the broader financial logic requires no such assumption.
When the operating cash generated by an asset falls while its debt obligations remain substantial, equity becomes the shock absorber.
That does not mean every lender loses money.
It means the sponsor's equity can ultimately bear the first major decline in asset value before the debt itself is fully impaired.
In several Hackman properties, the public record now shows that the equity cushion was not enough to prevent lenders from taking control or pursuing foreclosure.
The market changed underneath the portfolio
The deterioration in studio demand was not unique to Hackman.
FilmLA data shows just how unusual the earlier environment had been.
Average soundstage occupancy was at or above the 90th percentile during 2016–2022.
It fell to 69% in 2023, 63% in 2024, and 62% in the first half of 2025.
FilmLA cautions that occupancy is not the same thing as production utilization, and Stage Shoot Days provide another measure of activity.
Even with that qualification, the direction is clear.
The market moved from unusually strong studio demand toward materially weaker conditions.
At the same time, Hollywood was dealing with the aftermath of the pandemic, the 2023 strikes, reduced streaming spending and increasing competition from jurisdictions offering lower production costs and stronger incentives.
The result was not simply fewer shoots.
It was a less forgiving environment for expensive studio real estate.
But Hackman’s entire studio strategy did not fail
This is where the counterexample matters.
Silvercup Studios, another Hackman/Affinius studio investment in New York, refinanced approximately $280 million of debt in 2025 with Apollo Global Management and Deutsche Bank.
Refinancing does not prove that the investment generated a strong return.
It does not prove that the property was highly profitable.
And it does not erase the problems elsewhere in the portfolio.
But it establishes an important boundary around the thesis.
Studio real estate was not inherently destined to fail.
Not every Hackman studio investment followed the same path.
The difference is therefore more interesting than a simple “Hollywood collapsed” explanation.
Some properties were able to refinance or continue operating while others reached default, foreclosure or lender control.
The question becomes: what made the troubled investments less resilient?
The capital stack is the clue
The publicly visible numbers look like this:
| Property | Publicly reported acquisition / transaction value | Debt / financing visible in public record | Current distress signal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Radford Studio Center | ~$1.85B | ~$1.1B mortgage | Default; lenders took control; Netflix under contract |
| Television City | ~$750M | $357M+ lender claim reported | Forced-sale process |
| MBS Media Campus / MBS Group | $650M transaction* | ~$258M | Default / enforcement |
| Former Sony Pictures Animation campus | ~$160M | $100M+ mortgage reported | Foreclosure auction; sold to Fortress at steep discount |
| Kaufman Astoria Studios | Purchase price not reliably established | $340M loan; $359M+ claim reported | Foreclosure action |
| Silvercup Studios | Not included in this reconstruction | ~$280M refinanced | Counterexample: refinancing completed |
*The $650 million figure refers to the 2019 MBS Group transaction, which included both real estate and MBS Services and therefore should not be treated as the property's standalone purchase price.
Across the first four properties with publicly reported acquisition or transaction values, the figures total roughly $3.4 billion.
That number is useful as a scale indicator, not as a measure of losses.
The public record does not provide enough information to calculate Hackman’s total equity loss across these assets.
But the scale of the capital deployed, combined with the debt attached to several properties, explains why the downturn could become so consequential.
So was the strategy wrong?
Not exactly.
The original thesis had a rational foundation.
Streaming increased production spending.
Purpose-built studios were scarce.
Long-term demand for production infrastructure was real.
Institutional investors were willing to pay substantial prices for the assets.
Hackman was not alone in seeing the opportunity.
The problem was the interaction between timing, valuation, leverage and operating risk.
A strategy can be directionally correct and still produce bad investments if the price paid for the asset leaves too little margin for an adverse change in the market.
That appears to be the more defensible reading of Hackman’s current problems.
The company itself has acknowledged that not every deal worked.
In June 2026, Michael Hackman said the company had made mistakes on a couple of deals and expected to lose a lot of money on those properties.
That statement is significant because it does not describe the problem as a temporary market fluctuation affecting every asset.
It recognizes that some investments simply did not work.
The bigger lesson: being early can still be expensive
The studio boom created a powerful investment story.
Production was moving toward streaming.
Streaming companies needed content.
Content required stages.
Stages were scarce.
Therefore, owning stages looked like owning the bottleneck.
That logic was good enough to attract billions of dollars of institutional capital.
But a bottleneck is valuable only while demand remains strong enough to support the price of controlling it.
When demand weakens, the same physical asset can become a highly leveraged fixed-cost structure.
That is the distinction between owning a scarce asset and owning a scarce asset at the right price and with the right capital structure.
Hackman’s experience is therefore less a story about Hollywood suddenly becoming worthless than about what happens when a legitimate long-term thesis meets a shorter-term financing reality.
The company bet that studio demand would remain strong enough to support a rapidly expanding portfolio.
Several of its biggest bets were made during the period when that thesis looked strongest.
Then production slowed, occupancy fell, financing conditions tightened and the properties had less room to absorb the shock.
The evidence does not justify saying that Hackman’s entire empire failed.
It does support a more precise conclusion:
And that is the more important financial lesson.
The risk was never simply that Hollywood might produce fewer shows.
The risk was that billions of dollars of studio real estate had been committed to a demand story, while the debt attached to those assets still had to be paid when that story weakened.
Sources
Financial Times — Deutsche Bank led $1bn of troubled lending to Hollywood studio landlord
Los Angeles Times — Netflix is under contract to buy L.A. studio lot seized by Goldman
Los Angeles Times — Netflix plans to buy historic Radford Studio Center
Los Angeles Times — Historic Radford Studio Center in default amid Hollywood slowdown
Los Angeles Times — Legendary Television City may be sold in further blow to Hollywood
CoStar — Sony Pictures Animation campus near Los Angeles changes hands at steep discount
FilmLA — Sound Stage Occupancy / Stage Shoot Numbers Slip in New FilmLA Report
FilmLA — 2026 Sound Stage Occupancy Report
Carlyle — Hackman Capital Partners Acquires The MBS Group for $650 Million
Los Angeles Times — Sony Pictures Animation campus sells for $160 million
Bloomberg — NYC's Silvercup Studios refinances Apollo, Deutsche Bank loan
Hackman Capital Partners — Michael Hackman on Real Estate’s Latest Craze
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