They Just Raised the Last Beam at Fort Monmouth, and Hollywood East Stopped Being a Slogan

For years, “Hollywood East” was the kind of phrase you’d hear at a Chamber of Commerce lunch and quietly roll your eyes at. New Jersey has been telling itself it was about to become a film capital for as long as I’ve been alive. I grew up in Woodbury believing the movies happened somewhere else — out west, behind gates, in a place you had to leave Jersey to reach. So forgive me if I spent a decade treating the studio talk as a press release dressed up as a prophecy.

Done rolling my eyes

I’m done rolling my eyes. In June, crews at the old Fort Monmouth Army base hoisted the final structural beam on Stages 3 and 4 of Netflix’s new production campus — a $1 billion, 12-stage complex sprawling across Eatontown and Oceanport.

You don’t hoist a final beam on a rumor. That’s steel.Vinny Vinci

That’s a company betting a billion dollars that the next thing you binge could be shot forty-five minutes up the Parkway from where you’re sitting.

Not the whole story

And Netflix isn’t the whole story — it’s just the loudest chapter. Down the road there’s Lionsgate rising in Newark and 1888 Studios in Bayonne, where Paramount has already signed a ten-year lease on a big chunk of the place. Three of four major studio construction projects in the state are underway right now. A CBRE report out last month projects New Jersey’s soundstage inventory will triple by 2028. Triple. That’s not a state hoping for a break. That’s a state building an industry.

The gap that made kids leave

Here’s what gets me, as someone who cares more about the movies than the real estate. For most of film history, if you were a kid from South Jersey who wanted to work on a real production — I mean grip a light, pull a cable, hold a boom, act in a scene — you had one option. You left. You moved to Los Angeles or you commuted into New York and you hoped. The talent was always here. The industry never was. That gap is the single most quietly heartbreaking thing about growing up creative in this state, and almost nobody outside of it understands how deep it runs.

The beam starts to close it

The beam at Fort Monmouth starts to close that gap. When a soundstage opens in Eatontown, the electricians and carpenters and caterers and drivers come from around here. The production assistant answering phones on set could be a kid from Toms River instead of a transplant sleeping on a couch in Burbank. That’s the part that thrills me more than any celebrity sighting — the idea that a working film industry, with real paychecks and real crafts, is being poured in concrete on New Jersey ground.

The steel made me

I’m not naïve about it. Hollywood has a long history of promising a town the moon and leaving a parking lot. Incentive programs can dry up, studios overbuild, and a soundstage is just an expensive warehouse if the productions don’t come. The skeptic in me — the one raised on every Jersey boom that fizzled — is still standing in the back of the room with his arms crossed.

But that beam is up. And the next time some kid from Woodbury tells his family he wants to work in film, the honest answer might finally be: you don’t have to leave to do it. After a lifetime of hearing “Hollywood East” and not believing a word of it, I’ll admit it — I’m starting to believe. The steel made me.

Based on reporting from New Jersey 101.5, ROI-NJ, Jersey Digs, and CBRE’s 2026 Tri-State Film & Television Report. The Neighborhood Gazette covers South Jersey at neighborhoodgazette.town.