In 2018, British videogame company Rebellion joined the film and TV business. Film Stories got a guided tour of its Didcot studio - and met its maverick CEO, Jason Kingsley.
Most film studios are what you might call a blank canvas - big, airy, empty spaces where filmmakers can build sets and create their own worlds. Rebellion Film Studios, as co-founder and CEO Jason Kingsley admits, is intentionally something rather different: a hard-edged, industrial space that has its age and history already embedded in it.
“A lot of studios are just big sheds,” Kingsley notes. “But you’ve got to build everything. I always quite liked the Hollywood approach of having backlot sets that are sort of semi-permeable. ‘Here’s a New York street’. I felt we could do the same with sci-fi. Doctor Who could be filmed here… you could do a Mad Max equivalent, or horror movies, or an action adventure, or a Judge Dredd-type thing with a little bit of science fiction. That kind of stuff.”