The Oscars are leaving Hollywood Boulevard. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Thursday that beginning in 2029, the Academy Awards will move from the Dolby Theatre, their home since 2002, to the Peacock Theater at L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles.
The deal with AEG, the developer and operator of the L.A. Live complex, runs through 2039, covering ten consecutive ceremonies starting with the 101st Oscars.
The 100th Academy Awards in 2028 will be the final ceremony at the Dolby. Everything changes the year after.
And “everything” is not an exaggeration. The 2029 Oscars will also be the first to stream live on YouTube, under a separate deal the Academy announced late last year that ends a five-decade run on ABC.
The venue change and the broadcast shift arrive simultaneously, a paired reset for a ceremony that drew just 17.9 million viewers this year, down 9% from the prior year and the lowest in four years.
What Does This Move Mean For The Oscars?
The Dolby Theatre has hosted the Oscars for 24 years. It opened in 2001 as the Kodak Theatre, built at Hollywood and Highland specifically with the Academy Awards in mind as a possible long-term home.
The show moved in for the 74th ceremony in 2002 and stayed.
It has been the backdrop for some of the most memorable moments in modern Oscars history, from the longest Best Picture announcement in Academy history to the moment Will Smith walked on stage in 2022, and it became synonymous with Hollywood Boulevard in a way few venues in any industry manage.
The connection to the street itself has been part of the identity. Each year, multiple blocks of Hollywood Boulevard are shut down for days, the red carpet runs alongside the Walk of Fame, and for one night the stretch between the TCL Chinese Theatre and the El Capitan becomes the symbolic center of the film world. That version of the Oscars ends in 2028.
What replaces it is a move downtown that, logistically, the Academy had been considering for years.
According to people familiar with the planning who spoke to the LA Times on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, discussions about leaving the Dolby had been underway for the last couple of years. The announcement Thursday made it official.
Why L.A. Live?
The Peacock Theater, which is expected to be renamed before the Oscars arrive, as its naming rights come up for grabs in 2028, sits inside the L.A. Live campus, a 23-acre, 4-million-square-foot sports and entertainment district developed and operated by AEG.
The complex is adjacent to Crypto.com Arena and the Los Angeles Convention Center. It already hosts the Primetime Emmy Awards, which have been held there since 2008, as well as The Game Awards and other major events.
The theater currently seats 7,100 people, compared to the Dolby’s 3,400. That is more than double the capacity, a significant shift for a ceremony whose academy membership has grown to more than 11,000.
Space at the Dolby has been tight for years, with Academy members competing for seats and press operations crammed into limited backstage areas.
The campus setup is the other major factor. At the Dolby, the ceremony, press operations, and post-show events are spread across multiple locations.
At L.A. Live, all of it, red carpet arrivals, the ceremony, press areas, the Governors Ball, afterparties, fits within a single footprint that includes the adjacent JW Marriott hotel and its ballroom.
The Academy gets more control over the entire production rather than managing a series of disconnected locations across Hollywood Boulevard.
“L.A. Live was built to host the moments that define culture and there is no greater global stage than the Oscars,” said Todd Goldstein, AEG’s chief revenue officer. “Together, we will create an environment that celebrates creativity, honors excellence and delivers an unforgettable experience for movie fans everywhere.”
The Academy and AEG will also collaborate on custom design elements tailored specifically for the Oscars, with the venue undergoing major upgrades before 2029, including improvements to the stage, sound and lighting systems, lobbies, and backstage facilities.
Early design renderings released by the Academy suggest the new stage will retain the sweeping, curved proscenium that has defined the Dolby era, but at a larger scale with expanded screen space and a more immersive ceiling design.
The visual language of the show on television, the Academy appears to be signaling, will remain recognizable even as the room around it gets significantly bigger.
The YouTube Factor
The venue announcement cannot be separated from the broadcast announcement. The Oscars’ move to YouTube in 2029, under an exclusive global rights deal that runs through 2033, represents the most significant distribution change in the ceremony’s history.
ABC has aired the Oscars since 1976. That fifty-year run ends with the 100th ceremony in 2028.
The decision to move to YouTube is a direct response to a viewership slide that has been grinding on for three decades.
The Oscars peaked at over 55 million viewers in 1998. By 2021 the audience had collapsed to 10.4 million, the lowest in history. This year’s 17.9 million was a four-year low and a 9% drop from the year before.
The math for ABC, where ratings have translated directly into advertising revenue tied to viewership numbers, has become increasingly difficult to defend.
YouTube offers a different value proposition: global reach, no cable or satellite subscription required, and access to the audiences that no longer watch linear television.
The Academy is betting that the combination of lower barriers to access and a younger, more international audience justifies trading broadcast television’s reach for streaming’s scale.
The 2029 ceremony will be the first to test that bet, at the new downtown venue, on the new platform, without ABC.
This Is Not The First Oscars Move
The narrative around the Dolby as the Oscars’ permanent Hollywood home is relatively recent. The ceremony spent decades elsewhere. From 1988 through 2001 the show was held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.
Before that, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles hosted the ceremony for decades, from 1969 to 1987. The Oscars have lived downtown before. In some ways, Thursday’s announcement is less a departure than a return.
The very first Academy Awards ceremony, in 1929, was held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, about a two-minute walk from where the Dolby now stands.
The 2029 move to downtown happens to coincide almost exactly with the ceremony’s 100th anniversary.
The 100th show, in 2028, will be at the Dolby. The 101st, the first of a new century of Oscars, will be somewhere new.
What Has The Academy Said?
Academy CEO Bill Kramer and President Lynette Howell Taylor issued a joint statement Thursday framing the move as a forward-looking partnership rather than a retreat from tradition.
“We are thrilled to partner with a global powerhouse like AEG,” they said. “Their track record for building and operating technologically sophisticated live performance venues is unrivaled.
For the 101st Oscars and beyond, the Academy looks forward to closely collaborating with AEG to make L.A. Live the perfect backdrop for our global celebration of cinema, both for our live in-theater audience and for film fans around the world.”
The language tracks closely with how the Academy has framed the YouTube deal, an expansion of reach, not a concession to decline.
Whether that framing holds up will depend on what the 2029 ceremony actually looks like, whether the larger venue, the new platform, and the redesigned stage feel like a genuine upgrade or like a ceremony that traded its identity for logistics.
What is not in question is the scale of the change. The Oscars have occupied the same corner of Hollywood Boulevard for 24 years, and for three years more they will stay there.
But the institution that built the Kodak Theatre into a permanent home is now looking past it, at a bigger room downtown, a global streaming deal, and a version of the ceremony that does not exist yet.
The Dolby era ends with the 100th ceremony in 2028. Three years from now.
