Tom Avison pitches $290m Perth Film Studios to Netflix, Universal, Warner Bros, Disney

Australia is drawing record levels of international screen production, and Western Australia is making a very specific wager: Perth Film Studios, a $290m film studio on a former cow paddock site, needs to prove it can pull Hollywood output to Perth.

Avison is the face of that bet. He’s just back from Los Angeles when I meet him at Perth Film Studios on a warm May morning, and he immediately frames what matters most for persuading global studios: access, speed, and certainty. As inaugural chief executive, he had been on a whirlwind sales trip, “about 16 or 17 meetings” squeezed into four days with companies including Netflix, Universal, Warner Bros and Disney. The logic is simple, but brutally competitive. These production companies want to understand “what’s going on,” and Avison’s job is to make Perth an obvious place to say yes.

To understand why this pitch is so consequential, it helps to remember what launching a studio actually is. It is not just a building with good acoustics. It is an ecosystem. You need logistics that travel well across crews, vendors, equipment, locations and post-production. You need to coordinate talent flows in a country where long distances can turn a minor delay into a major cost. And you need relationships, because studios are not lightly rerouting multi-million-dollar schedules. Avison, back in tour-guide mode at the major new facility in Whiteman, on Perth’s semi-rural north-eastern fringe, is selling a pipeline, not a one-off set.

His background also signals how Perth is trying to win. Before this role, he helped open Sky Studios Elstree outside London, a major production base that launched with Wicked and later hosted Jurassic World and Bridget Jones. That matters because those later big-name titles are proof of a core studio-building thesis: if you can attract early attention and then operationalize reliability, you can become a default destination rather than a temporary experiment. Perth is betting it can replicate that arc in Western Australia.

There is also a “why now” pressure. The source notes that Australia is drawing record levels of international screen production. When the global market is already hot, the first mover does not just get a larger slice. It also sets the narrative for where future projects will anchor. Western Australia’s decision to invest heavily is a bid for that narrative leadership, and it comes with an implicit scoreboard: if Perth Film Studios can “bring some of it west,” then the studio becomes more than real estate, it becomes an allocator of employment, local services, and long-term demand.

Regulation and policy are rarely visible in a sales pitch, but they shape the runway for international productions deciding where to shoot. In broad terms, screen production often hinges on incentives and compliance frameworks that can affect cost structures and scheduling decisions. For executives and boards, the practical takeaway is that physical capacity alone is not enough. You need to pair the studio with the surrounding rules of the game so that a production company does not have to treat Perth like a special case. The source does not list specific policy details, but it does make clear that the facility is being presented to “any production company that you can think of,” which is the stance you take when you believe you can meet the operational and administrative needs required for global scale.

The second-order implication for decision-makers is that this kind of studio push is also a relationship strategy. Avison’s meetings list is a who’s-who of platform and studio power. Netflix, Universal, Warner Bros and Disney represent different production models and different tolerance for uncertainty. A studio that earns visits from all of them can start building momentum across the value chain, including location-based shoots, rental demand, and longer contracts for stages and sound stages. Even when not every meeting becomes a project, the outcome is still measurable in one way: market awareness, and the ability to convert future interest into scheduled work.

Strategically, Perth’s pitch also affects how other jurisdictions think about the “studio gravity” question. If Australia’s record production pull is already underway, then a $290m bet in Whiteman is a signal that the competition is moving from passive attractiveness to active infrastructure creation. For executives considering partnerships, site selection, or investment in creative real assets, the lesson is not that every bet will win. It is that the winners are the ones that treat studio development as an industry-building project with a sales engine behind it. Perth Film Studios is trying to do exactly that, and Avison’s sales trip suggests the facility’s managers are already running at Hollywood’s pace.