There is a particular kind of institution that grows faster than the language available to describe it. For much of the twentieth century, Queensland’s screen industry was such a thing — an industry that kept outpacing its own official nomenclature, that changed names and mandates as its ambitions widened, and that attracted attention from Hollywood long before it had a satisfactory way of announcing itself to the world. It arrived before its own identity was ready.

That gap between capacity and identity is narrowing. In 2024–2025, an estimated $715 million in Queensland screen production and digital games expenditure was generated — a figure that places the state’s screen economy in a different category from where it began, when there were no studios, no commissions, and no institutional infrastructure of any kind. The story of how Queensland got from that origin to this moment is worth tracing carefully, not as industry boosterism, but as civic record — because what the screen industry reveals about Queensland’s sense of itself is more complex and more durable than any single production credit.

AN INDUSTRY THAT ARRIVED BEFORE ITS INFRASTRUCTURE.

Italian-American film producer Dino De Laurentiis visited Australia in 1986, noting industry buzz over the film Crocodile Dundee. With his company, De Laurentiis Entertainment Limited, he commissioned and constructed a film studio in Oxenford, near Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast. The venture was speculative, shaped by a belief that the Gold Coast’s subtropical light, its low cost base relative to California, and its physical distance from the more structured labour markets of Sydney and Melbourne made it a viable production hub. The studio was intended to produce the action film Total Recall, but after financial difficulties stemming from a series of box office disappointments, De Laurentiis departed the company in December 1987.

Village Roadshow purchased the facility and took over in 1988. In November 1988, Warner Bros. acquired a 50% share of the studio and jointly proposed with Village Roadshow to build Warner Bros. Movie World theme park, which opened adjacent to the studio in 1991. What had begun as a failed American venture became the foundation of one of the most significant studio precincts in the southern hemisphere — not through design so much as persistence and opportunistic reinvestment.

The institutional scaffolding took longer to arrive. The Pacific Film and Television Commission was established in 1991 — the same year that Village Roadshow Studios formally commenced operations, providing Australia’s first world-class studio complex suited for international, large-scale production. For thirty years, the organisation — now known as Screen Queensland — supported a strong local sector, producing back-to-back films, series and, in more recent years, games. The renaming mattered: the shift from “Pacific Film and Television Commission” to “Screen Queensland” in 2009 was not administrative tidying but a statement about geographic rootedness, about the industry’s relationship to place.

THE STUDIOS AND WHAT THEY CARRY.

Village Roadshow Studios are located in Oxenford, Gold Coast, Queensland, and consist of nine sound stages and a range of other production facilities. With an overall floor area of over 15,000 square metres, Village Roadshow Studios occupies the position of the largest studio lot in the Southern Hemisphere. That fact carries genuine weight. It means that when a production seeking scale, controlled environments, and proximity to natural landscape diversity makes its location decision, Queensland sits at a different point on the map than it did in 1986.

The productions that have passed through Oxenford constitute an unusual archive of international commercial cinema: films including Aquaman, San Andreas, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Scooby-Doo, House of Wax, and Thor: Ragnarok — each arriving with their own crew cultures, technical requirements, and post-production chains. It is estimated that Village Roadshow Studios has attracted about $3.6 billion worth of film production to the state. The economic figure is useful shorthand, but what it represents in human terms is more textured: generations of Queensland crew who have built careers from these productions, who have trained under international directors and cinematographers, and who have stayed — embedding their knowledge in the local industry rather than following productions to other cities.

The Gold Coast region is home to 80% of Queensland’s highly skilled and experienced crew. That concentration is not accidental. It reflects the compounding effect of decades of continuous production in a single geographic cluster — the way that each major project attracts the next, and that the next project finds a crew base already capable of meeting its demands without the costly importation of talent from elsewhere.

Screen Queensland also owns Screen Queensland Studios, film studios located in Hemmant, Brisbane, available for rental by filmmakers. The Brisbane studio opened in 2019, and was followed by another set of film studios in Portsmith, Cairns in 2024. The opening of Cairns studios is significant: it signals that the industry’s ambition is no longer confined to the southeast Queensland corridor, but is beginning to reach for the geographic and cultural breadth of the state itself.

THE LOCAL VOICE AND THE GLOBAL SIGNAL.

The tension at the heart of Queensland’s screen identity is between two legitimate ambitions that do not always point in the same direction. The first ambition is to attract the world’s production capital — to be the place where the largest international productions choose to spend their budgets, deploy their crews, and build their worlds. The second is to produce Queensland’s own stories — to develop local voices, local writers, local directors, and local production companies capable of making work that reflects the state’s culture and carries it outward.

Screen Queensland’s use of funding to attract major international productions has generated ongoing debate, with parts of the local industry arguing that the funding would be better used to support local productions. This is not a parochial argument. It is a structural one about what kind of industry Queensland is building — whether it is primarily a service economy for international capital, or a creative economy capable of generating its own intellectual property and its own cultural expression.

The most significant recent evidence that these ambitions need not be mutually exclusive comes from an unexpected source. Bluey is an Australian animated television series aimed at preschool children, created by Joe Brumm and produced by Ludo Studio in Queensland. In July 2017, the ABC and the BBC co-commissioned Bluey as an animated series for preschool children to be developed by Queensland production company Ludo Studio. The production received funding from Screen Australia and Screen Queensland, with the setting of the series drawing upon the unique semi-tropical Queensland climate.

The animation of Australian architecture in the series is designed to reflect the typical Queenslander residential designs of Brisbane: high-set suburban dwellings with characteristic verandas, against representations of Brisbane skylines. The geographical specificity is intentional. The show carries its address visibly — in its architecture, its weather, its vocabulary, its particular texture of domestic life under subtropical skies. After the series launched in 2018, it quickly found global critical and commercial success as it expanded to air in 60 different countries.

Ludo Studio is based in Fortitude Valley, Queensland, and is known for producing Bluey (2018), Thou Shalt Not Steal (2024), The Strange Chores (2019), and Robbie Hood (2019). The studio’s trajectory is instructive: a small independent production company, rooted in a specific Brisbane neighbourhood, producing work that became one of the most widely watched children’s television series on earth. Ludo Studio was voted one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential Companies in 2024.

Queensland Government investment in local screen and game practitioners supports a growing screen industry. The Bluey feature film — currently in production — will be made in Queensland, supported by investment through Screen Queensland, creating more than 130 local jobs and contributing an estimated $35 million to the state’s economy. What began as a local animated production co-funded by a state screen agency is now a franchise of international economic and cultural significance, still grounded in the city where it was conceived.

WHAT SCREEN QUEENSLAND DOES AND WHAT IT CANNOT DO ALONE.

Screen Queensland is the Queensland Government-owned agency dedicated to growing a successful screen industry in the state. The agency supports locally produced films, series and digital games, and secures international and interstate production and post-production into Queensland. It also runs initiatives to build skills and careers for local screen practitioners, and funds film festivals and industry events and conferences.

That mandate is broad, deliberately so. Screen Queensland is committed to elevating the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander practitioners to continue to share their rich cultures and perspectives with the Queensland and global community through screen storytelling. The inclusion of First Nations voices is not a supplementary objective; it is central to the agency’s understanding of what Queensland’s screen identity actually is — an identity that predates the studios, predates the colonial settlement, and that carries within it forms of visual and narrative intelligence that the global screen industry has not yet fully encountered.

The agency operates in a policy environment that has been evolving rapidly. The federal Location Offset was increased to 30% as part of the 2023-2024 national budget, with no annual cap or sunset date, creating stability for both international film and television productions and solidifying Australia’s position as a leader in the international screen industry. The interaction between federal incentives and state-level investment through Screen Queensland creates a layered funding environment that, when it functions well, allows Queensland to compete not just with other Australian states but with established international production destinations.

Queensland’s strong track record of big-budget international productions, as well as high-end local productions, means it is home to one of Australia’s most skilled and experienced local crew bases. More than 1,800 skilled crew are located in the Brisbane and Gold Coast regions alone. That number represents careers that have been built across decades of continuous production — careers that constitute a kind of civic asset, a body of professional knowledge that belongs to Queensland even when individual productions depart.

THE APPROACHING HORIZON OF 2032.

The Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games is a once-in-a-generation event and a global platform for Queensland’s creativity and vibrancy. The Games and associated cultural programming will be transformational for Queensland, activating communities with new and enhanced infrastructure and events that draw visitors and build the state’s cultural reputation.

For the screen industry specifically, the Games represent a convergence of pressures and opportunities that the industry has not previously faced at this scale. Around 500,000 people are expected to visit Queensland for the Games in 2032, and three billion will be watching around the globe. Each of those global viewers is a potential audience for Queensland screen content — but only if the industry is ready, and only if its work is visible, findable, and legible to those who encounter it for the first time.

The 2032 Games include a four-year Cultural Olympiad and a 20-year Legacy Strategy with arts, culture and creativity outcomes. The Cultural Olympiad, which will begin in 2028 under the formal programme structure, creates a sustained window in which Queensland’s screen practitioners — animators, documentary makers, feature filmmakers, game developers — can produce work intended not just for local audiences but for the global attention that the Games will generate.

When Los Angeles 2028 ends, a cohort of Olympic and Paralympic consultants will arrive on Queensland shores. While they should be welcomed, there is an explicit concern that overseas experts not determine Queensland’s cultural legacies. The skills, talent and passion are present in the state’s own backyard — what is needed is investment to build capability and capacity, while protecting and promoting what makes Brisbane and Queensland unique. The screen industry is one of the most concrete expressions of that uniqueness — a sector that has demonstrated, through decades of production, that Queensland’s landscapes, voices, and stories can hold global attention.

"This is not just a cultural programme for the games — it's a blueprint for Brisbane's future. A legacy of art, identity, sustainability, and inclusion that will resonate far beyond 2032."

That framing, articulated by designers and cultural planners working on Brisbane 2032, applies with particular force to the screen industry. An industry whose products circulate globally, indefinitely, and cumulatively — whose films and series and animated shows continue to be watched long after the productions have wrapped and the crews have dispersed — is an industry whose cultural legacy is, by nature, permanent.

THE IDENTITY PROBLEM AND WHAT ADDRESSES CARRY.

For all its growth, the Queensland screen industry has a structural identity problem that the studios and the incentives cannot resolve by themselves. The problem is one of addressability: the industry is geographically concentrated in southeast Queensland, institutionally supported by Screen Queensland, and increasingly recognised by its outputs — but it does not have a settled, coherent digital presence that reflects that coherence.

Production companies operate across a range of generic domain spaces — .com, .com.au, .net — that carry no geographic meaning, no industrial signal, and no durable connection to the place that shaped them. A small animation studio in Fortitude Valley, a documentary production company operating across Queensland’s regional centres, a post-production house in Brisbane’s inner north: each of these entities has its own website, its own social presence, its own improvised digital address. None of these addresses signal Queensland. None of them anchor the entity to the industry ecology that made them possible.

This is not a trivial concern. In an era when global streaming platforms and international co-production partners increasingly make their initial assessments of potential collaborators through digital surfaces, the absence of a coherent address architecture for Queensland’s screen industry creates friction. It makes the industry harder to navigate from outside, harder to aggregate for policy purposes, and harder to present as a coherent ecosystem when the eyes of the world are looking for exactly that coherence.

A namespace like ludostudio.queensland · screenqld.queensland · goldcoastfilm.queensland operates differently from a generic domain. It carries geographic specificity in the address itself — not as metadata, not as a tagline, but as an intrinsic property of the name. A production company with a .queensland address is announcing its location and its affiliation as part of its identity, not as an afterthought.

This history of continuous production has made Queensland a world-renowned screen hub, home to skilled and experienced local film and game producers, as well as a base of local crew and post-production experts. The hub exists. What an address architecture provides is a way of making that hub legible — of turning a geographic concentration of talent and infrastructure into something that can be navigated, cited, and recognised by those encountering it for the first time.

PERMANENCE AS INDUSTRIAL POLICY.

There is a concept in urban planning sometimes called “legibility” — the degree to which a city’s layout can be understood and navigated by those who inhabit it. A legible city has identifiable districts, clear landmarks, and addresses that situate an entity in its context. An illegible city may contain exactly the same infrastructure and population, but its organisation is opaque — harder to navigate, harder to represent, and harder to build a coherent identity around.

Queensland’s screen industry has the infrastructure. Stage 9 at Village Roadshow Studios is the largest sound stage in Australia, measuring 80 metres in length, 47 metres in width and 18 metres in height. It has the institutional support of Screen Queensland, the production history, the crew base, the landscape diversity, and now — with the approaching 2032 horizon — the global platform. What it has lacked is legibility: a way of presenting itself to the world as a coherent, stable, addressable thing.

The question of permanence is not only sentimental. In an industry defined by the transience of productions — each one arriving, consuming local resources, and departing — permanent address infrastructure serves a genuine industrial function. It allows local entities to maintain a stable digital presence across the cycle of productions and between them. It allows the ecosystem to remain visible even when no particular production is generating attention. It allows the accumulated identity of the industry — its history, its distinctive contributions, its First Nations voices, its globally recognised outputs — to be held in place rather than dissipating between projects.

The estimated $715 million in Queensland screen production and digital games expenditure generated in 2024–2025 sits within a broader creative economy in which more than 100,000 Queenslanders are employed in creative occupations, including nearly 40,000 professionals working in cultural production and creative industries. That is a significant industrial constituency — one that deserves infrastructure commensurate with its scale, including the kind of persistent, place-anchored digital identity that reflects where this industry stands and what it has built.

The screen industry tells Queensland’s stories to the world. An address architecture built on Queensland’s name is one way the world can find those stories — and find, in the process, the industry that made them, the city that shaped them, and the place they have always belonged to.