Baja Studios, formerly Fox Baja, is an American-owned film studio near the resort community of Rosarito, Baja California, Mexico. It comprises the world's largest stages and water tanks designed for filming.[1] As well as major film work the facility is used for making commercials, music videos, television series, and movies for television.
Fox Baja Studios began life as a subsidiary of Twentieth Century Fox, a part of the global corporate holdings of Rupert Murdoch on land leased by the Hollywood studio. Construction of the facility costing an estimated $20 million USD[2] began on 6 June 1996 on land leased by the Hollywood studio next to the northern edge of a small fishing village (Puerto Popotla). Construction lasted 100 days.[3] The corporation had an interest in breaking the power in Hollywood of the Teamsters Union;[4][5] the corporation had learned from the Wapping dispute. The studio's design was heavily influenced by the production needs of the first film to be shot there, James Cameron's epic Titanic, where there was a requirement to shoot a 775-foot-long (236 m) replica of the ship in a water tank.[6]
Fox sold the studios in May 2007 to Baja Acquisitions (a consortium of "local financial interests") for an eight-figure US dollar sum.[7]
There was a downturn in the area from 2007 when tourism lessened due to a local drug war and a tightening of travel restrictions.[8] Popotla had become attractive to smugglers of illegal immigrants at night once the restaurant trade had closed for the day.[9]
In 2018 a resurgence in filmmaking for Internet streaming by Amazon, HBO, and Netflix lifted prospects for the studio.[10]
Facilities
Film set at Baja Studios
The studio is built alongside the ocean coastline, enabling an unobstructed view of the sea. It comprises 35 acres (14 ha) of land overlooking the Pacific Ocean,[11] with 2,000 feet (610 m) of coastline frontage. The facility has 5 stages, 4 indoor and outdoor water tanks, street sets, and is a self-contained facility, with offices, scenery shops, wardrobe and dressing rooms. Two of the stages and three of the tanks are combined. There are four tanks with a combined volume of over 20 million gallons fed by a filtration seawater plant capable of delivering 9,000 gallons of water per minute.
Tank 1 is an infinite horizon pond which adjoins and overlooks the Pacific. Built to film Titanic, it is a 360,000 square feet (33,000 m2) concrete pool with a full capacity of 17 million gallons,[3] used for exterior shooting, wet or dry, and consists of three depth levels from 3+1⁄2 to 40 feet (1.1 to 12.2 m). The tank can be emptied or filled in 40 hours. Alongside it is a 162 foot (49 metres) motor-driven tower crane, used for constructing film sets and as a lighting and camera platform. Fox employed mostly American technical personnel for the tank's construction, despite available Mexican resources. On completion of filming, the tank was drained of chlorinated water too quickly without management in one batch, ruining the fishing waters at Popotla.[5][12]
There is a smaller outdoor tank and another two built into an indoor stage.
Studio tour
Fox created a Studio Tour named Foxploration, which opened in May 2001 consisting largely of Titanic exhibits, Fox-derived displays, and items from other films, notably Master and Commander.[13] This tour closed.
