The Atlanta film company behind Cocaine Bear and Marvel’s Loki wants to tear up its soundstage blueprints and build a massive data center instead, but DeKalb County isn’t letting it happen without a fight. Shadowbox Studios and an affiliate have filed a $30 million lawsuit against the county, arguing officials reversed course after years of telling the studio its plans were permitted by right.
The suit, filed in DeKalb County Superior Court in August, claims $200 million in lost property value tied to the 166-acre site at 3600 International Park Drive. According to WSB-TV, Shadowbox and its affiliate, Henrico 183 LLC, say county planning staff issued three separate written assurances between 2023 and 2025 confirming that a data center was allowed on the property. The DeKalb County Zoning Board of Appeals later scuttled Shadowbox’s data-center plan, according to the Atlanta Business Chronicle. Commissioner Nicole Massiah said the matter would be heard in court if it was not settled.
From Soundstages to Servers
Shadowbox, known to Atlanta moviegoers as the studio behind Cocaine Bear and the Marvel series Loki, according to Bloomberg, bought the International Park Drive site in January 2021 for $8.5 million to expand its soundstage campus under a $380 million project supported by local tax incentives. The studio’s board voted in July 2024 to abandon that expansion in favor of a data center, the Atlanta Business Chronicle reports, as softening film production demand made soundstages a harder sell than server racks.
The pivot is a big one. Shadowbox formally applied to Georgia Power in 2024 for 651 megawatts of electrical capacity for the DeKalb facility and says it has already spent more than $30 million on site preparation and infrastructure planning before county approvals stalled, per the Business Chronicle’s reporting. That kind of power draw would make the project one of the larger single data center requests in the region.
Backers With Deep Pockets
Shadowbox operates its Atlanta film studio with financial muscle behind it. Private equity firm Silver Lake committed $500 million in strategic capital in June 2022 to support an estimated $1.5 billion global soundstage platform spanning Atlanta, London and Los Angeles, working alongside majority owner Commonwealth Asset Management, according to Silver Lake. The studio first opened in 2017 as Blackhall Studios and rebranded in 2022, the Business Chronicle notes…