The entertainment business has long been a coastal affair. The industry is synonymous with its Los Angeles, Hollywood neighborhood after all. But a shift is occurring. Today, some of the most compelling entertainment storylines are coming from North Texas.
Take for example, Taylor Sheridan’s Landman. The show enjoyed massive ratings, becoming Paramount’s biggest franchise hit and a global breakout, with a third season already green-lighted. But the significance of Landman, filmed and produced in large part in Fort Worth, goes beyond the ratings. The show’s success is representative of a growing Texas production ecosystem that now includes new studio infrastructure, expanding facilities and a widening pipeline of film and television projects rooted in the Lone Star State.
Over the last several years, North Texas has emerged as a premier global financial hub, giving rise to the term “Y’all Street.” Now, a new American entertainment production hub is taking shape here as well — one built on creative ambition, operational discipline, infrastructure and a cowboy attitude.
Call it Y’allywood.
A new type of studio system
If you want a glimpse of the future of the entertainment business, skip the backlots in Burbank, Calif. Look instead at Taylor Sheridan’s Bosque Ranch and SGS Studios located in and around Fort Worth.
What Sheridan and his team have built is a vertically integrated hit factory — writing, producing and shooting with a model designed for speed. Sheridan is the entertainment industry at its best — an auteur with the storytelling chops and discipline the industry was built on — yet his Texas compound runs like a high-velocity startup.
The breakout performance of Landman has coincided with real follow-on effects: expanded studio infrastructure, a growing slate of film and television projects from Sheridan’s 101 Studios, and increased production activity in the region. The result, invariably, is more jobs and more investment.
Another very different studio example is Dude Perfect, the Frisco-based digital content creators who took a formula for backyard trick-shot YouTube videos and turned it into a global media engine. The group’s new 80,000-square-foot headquarters — complete with filming bays, warehouse studio space, creator labs and a fan-facing experience — is a purpose-built production campus designed to operate like a studio.
Dude Perfect is just one instance of a much bigger shift. After years of eye-rolling by Hollywood, content creators are finally becoming accepted by the industry. And the Lone Star State is quietly becoming a critical industry hub.
Across Texas, creator-led companies aren’t renting houses and calling them studios. They’re building real, future-facing production organizations. Night Media, founded in Dallas and now operating between Austin and L.A., has become one of the most influential creator-focused companies in the country, managing online streamers like MrBeast and Kai Cenat while building out development, studio, venture and operational divisions that function much closer to an entertainment company than an influencer shop.
As podcasting popularity continues to explode around the world, multiple networks and video-first media operations have turned Austin into a growing audio-visual production cluster. An entire ecosystem of independent producers, editors, comedy creators and show-development outfits now treat Texas as a full-time base of operations.
Why Texas Is Emerging as Hollywood’s Next Frontier
Texas is on the rise because the future of entertainment needs more than just talent — it needs space, capital and computing power. L.A. lacks the space, or the energy grid, to support this growth. In L.A., a warehouse might become a temporary set. In Texas, a warehouse can become an entire campus. Purpose-built sound stages and production environments aren’t pipe dreams, but practical business decisions.
Then, there’s the money. The Dallas-Fort Worth region is now one of the fastest-growing financial hubs in the country. This includes private equity firms, family offices and banks that have expertise building scalable, valuable companies, not just funding entertainment vehicles. They value repeatable systems and long-term intellectual property, the ingredients it takes to build the next frontier of entertainment.
Lastly, whether you’re an AI skeptic or not, the next chapter of entertainment will require more computing power than the last. Processes from pre-visualization and virtual production to visual effects cleanup, localization to editing workflows often require massive, reliable computing power. Texas has more of what the coasts don’t: land for data center buildout, lower-cost power and a grid that can handle industrial-scale processing.
This isn’t a story about coastal decline. Hollywood’s creative center of gravity isn’t going anywhere. But the map is changing. The entertainment frontier is growing beyond its coastal homes and Texas is becoming the place where the next generation of studios comes to create.
Hollywood was born from pioneers chasing a new horizon. That’s why it shouldn’t be surprising that its next chapter is unfolding in a place built by pioneers, too — where the frontier never really closed, and where storytellers still have the room to roam. Welcome to Y’allywood.
Chris Gannett is chief executive and founder of Gannett.Partners
