Best VFX Studios in Los Angeles (2026)

Introduction

Los Angeles still has the largest concentration of visual effects studios in the US, though most of the big ones now run much of their artist headcount from Vancouver, Montreal, London or India. The 13 studios below all keep an active LA office in 2026 and were chosen for recent credits, 2025 and 2026 recognition, and the range of work they take on.

The local map changed sharply in 2025. Technicolor Group closed its US offices in February 2025 and entered administration in the UK, which shut The Mill and MPC in Los Angeles. TransPerfect bought both brands, relaunched The Mill in October 2025 with studios in London, Paris, Seoul and Bangalore, and merged MPC into it in June 2026, but neither has reopened in LA. FuseFX retired its name the same month as the Technicolor collapse and now trades as FOLKS, with a new office in Burbank. In October 2025 Netflix brought Scanline VFX and Eyeline Studios together under the single Eyeline name.

Every studio here has a working Los Angeles base in 2026, including Santa Monica, Culver City, Playa Vista and Burbank. The list runs in no fixed order of merit, since the right choice depends on shot count, schedule, budget and whether the job is a feature, a series or a spot.

The best VFX studios in Los Angeles

1. Digital Domain

Owned by Digital Domain Holdings (Hong Kong listed) · Playa Vista · digitaldomain.com

Digital Domain has been one of the main Hollywood effects houses for more than 30 years and has won three Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects, plus seven Scientific and Technical awards. It is headquartered in Playa Vista, with further studios in Vancouver, Montreal, Luxembourg, Hyderabad and several Chinese cities. The parent company is Hong Kong-listed Digital Domain Holdings.

Recent and current features include The Fantastic Four: First Steps, A Minecraft Movie, Supergirl and Avengers: Doomsday. The studio also runs an advertising division, a visualisation and motion capture studio, and a Digital Humans Lab for real-time virtual humans, which is useful for brand and games work that needs a digital likeness.

2. Framestore

Majority owned by Cultural Investment Holdings · Santa Monica · framestore.com

Framestore is the largest VFX company in Europe and has around 3,000 staff across seven studios, one of them on Exposition Boulevard on the Santa Monica side of Los Angeles. Shanghai-based Cultural Investment Holdings has owned 75% of the company since 2016. In 2020 Framestore bought Deluxe's creative businesses, so the former Method Studios now operates under the Framestore name.

The company has won multiple Academy Awards and BAFTAs and 14 Primetime Emmys. Its LA office serves film, episodic and advertising clients, with advertising run globally under president Charles Howell. Large film work is usually split across London, Montreal and Mumbai, so ask where your shots will be done.

3. FOLKS

Part of Pitch Black, majority owned by EagleTree Capital funds · Burbank · folksvfx.com

FOLKS took over the former FuseFX studios in February 2025, retiring a brand that had started in Los Angeles in 2006. Both belong to Pitch Black, whose other studios include Rising Sun Pictures and El Ranchito. The combined company has more than 900 artists, and opened a Burbank office as part of the change. Former FuseFX president Johnny Fisk leads the US business as executive vice president.

FOLKS works mostly on episodic television and features. IT: Welcome to Derry earned a 2026 Emmy nomination for its effects, and other recent credits include Wednesday, Reacher season 3 and Five Nights at Freddy's 2.

4. Zoic Studios

Independent · Culver City · zoicstudios.com

Zoic was founded in 2002 by Andrew Orloff, Loni Peristere, Chris Jones and Tim McBride, and has been based in Culver City for most of its life, with sister studios in Vancouver and New York. It won an Emmy for its work on the CSI franchise and has a long episodic record that includes Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad.

In April 2026 Zoic completed 563 shots across all ten episodes of Peacock's The Miniature Wife, which needed a consistent dual-scale world. The studio also does advertising, games and interactive work, and has invested in virtual production and real-time rendering.

5. Eyeline

Owned by Netflix · Los Angeles · eyelinestudios.com

Eyeline is the name Netflix gave its combined VFX business in October 2025, when it merged Scanline VFX (bought in 2021) with Eyeline Studios. It has more than 1,200 staff across Los Angeles, Vancouver, Montreal, London, Munich, Stuttgart and Seoul. Scanline's proprietary fluid simulation software, Flowline, won a Scientific and Technical Academy Award in 2008.

Recent credits include Happy Gilmore 2 and Wednesday for Netflix, and Daredevil: Born Again for Disney+. Eyeline also takes non-Netflix work, such as Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, and offers virtual production alongside traditional VFX.

6. Pixomondo

Owned by Sony Pictures · Culver City · pixomondo.com

Pixomondo is part of the Sony Pictures group and has its LA studio on Washington Boulevard in Culver City. It covers VFX, virtual production on LED volumes and real-time visualisation for film, television and commercials.

Its episodic work is its best-known side. Recent credits include House of the Dragon season 2, The Penguin and Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender, following earlier work on Game of Thrones.

7. Crafty Apes

Independent · Los Angeles · craftyapes.com

Crafty Apes is a full-service VFX company with studios in Los Angeles, New York, New Jersey, Vancouver, London and Sydney. It has added a roster of creative and production supervisors, so it can provide on-set supervision and VFX consulting as well as shot work.

The studio received three Emmy nominations for outstanding special visual effects, for Alien: Earth, Foundation and IT: Welcome to Derry. Other recent credits include Thunderbolts*, Nobody 2, Black Bag, The Bear season 4 and Only Murders in the Building.

8. Luma Pictures

Independent · Santa Monica · lumapictures.com

Luma Pictures was founded in Venice in 2002 and remains independent, with its Los Angeles office on Broadway in Santa Monica and further studios in Melbourne and Vancouver. It places a lot of weight on studio culture and keeps a relatively small senior team.

Luma has a long relationship with Marvel, including Spider-Man: No Way Home and the I Am Groot shorts. Other credits include Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Halo season 2 and Baz Luhrmann's Elvis.

9. Lola Visual Effects

Independent, founder-owned · Los Angeles · lolavfx.com

Lola was founded in 2004 by Edson Williams and Thomas Nittmann, who still own and run it. It was the first VFX company to offer digital cosmetic work on actors, and it remains the specialist for de-ageing, digital make-up and body work, with offices in New York, New Orleans and London as well as Los Angeles.

Much of its work is for Marvel, from Avengers: Endgame and Black Widow to The Marvels and Daredevil: Born Again (2026). It also worked on Tron: Ares (2025). It suits productions that need a small number of very close-up shots done invisibly.

10. Wylie Co.

Independent · Culver City · wylievfx.com

Wylie Co. was founded in 2015 by VFX supervisor Jake Maymudes and works on features and episodic series from Culver City, Brooklyn and Montreal, with a London studio planned for 2027. It handles visualisation as well as final VFX.

The studio is known for invisible, photographic work: CG set extensions, window comps and digital doubles. For David Fincher's The Killer it built a 6K photoreal digital double of Michael Fassbender. It is a good fit for directors who want effects that do not read as effects.

11. Barnstorm VFX

Independent · Los Angeles · barnstormvfx.com

Barnstorm VFX has studios in Los Angeles, Vancouver, New York, Montreal, London, Atlanta and Toronto. It works mainly on episodic television and features.

The studio offers a flexible model: on-set supervision, artists in-house or remote, cloud services, look development and virtual production, scaled to what a production needs. That suits showrunners who want one vendor to stay with a series across seasons.

12. MakeMake (formerly a52)

Independent · Santa Monica · makemake.com

MakeMake is the single studio formed when Angus Wall's group of companies (Rock Paper Scissors for editing, Elastic for design and animation, a52 for VFX and Primary for colour) came together under one name. It has more than 200 artists between its Santa Monica base on Broadway, a second LA space at Radio Hill near Chinatown, and New York.

The VFX team, formerly a52, is one of the most established names in US commercial work. Recent featured projects include Nike's "Jordan Banned" and "Winning Isn't For Everyone", Amazon Music, SKIMS, IKEA and Stella Artois, with agencies such as Wieden+Kennedy, 72andSunny and Anomaly. Clients can buy edit, colour, design and VFX on one contract.

13. Untold Studios

Independent · Culver City · untoldstudios.tv

Untold Studios started in London and opened its US West Coast headquarters on Higuera Street in Culver City, alongside offices in New York and Mumbai. It describes itself as a studio "enabled by next-generation technology".

Untold covers VFX, motion design, music and directing, and works mostly in advertising and branded content. With The Mill and MPC gone from Los Angeles, it is one of the few London-rooted commercial VFX names still on the ground in the city.

What to look for in a Los Angeles VFX studio

Start with where the work will be done. Most of the large studios on this list keep supervisors and client services in Los Angeles but place the bulk of shot work in Canada, the UK or India, where tax credits make it cheaper. That model works well, but it affects review hours, time zones and which incentives your production can claim, so settle it early.

Check stability. The Technicolor collapse in February 2025 left productions and agencies mid-job with a vendor that closed overnight. Ownership is worth understanding: private equity, a studio parent such as Sony or Netflix, a listed holding company, or founders. Ask who supervises your show and whether they have been at the studio through the last two years of change.

Match the studio to the format. Feature houses such as Digital Domain and Framestore handle thousands of shots and large creature or environment builds. Episodic specialists such as FOLKS, Zoic and Crafty Apes are set up for steady weekly turnover across a season. Commercial shops such as MakeMake and Untold move fast on short schedules and often fold design, colour and finishing into one bid.

Finally, look at how shots move between you and the studio. VFX generates heavy plates, renders and many versions of each shot, and approvals often involve a director, a studio executive and an agency at once. A clear process for delivering plates, sharing versions and tracking notes saves days on every round.

How Fabric helps VFX teams

Fabric gives a studio or production team one workspace for its files, review links and project knowledge, with AI search across all of it. VFX work produces far more data than most disciplines, and there is a good overview of the problem in why rendering files need a home.

Plates, renders and reference sit in Fabric's cloud drive, which streams files on demand so they take no local disk space. Heavy video opens without a full download, and shared team folders always hold the latest version. Teams that cut with proxies can read more in what is a proxy workflow.

Finding a shot or a reference is quicker with search, which works by meaning across documents, images and transcribed audio and video, and jumps to the right timestamp. Similar search finds images with matching composition, colour and subject, which helps when a supervisor asks for "more like this" during look development.

For client review, any version or folder can be published as a web page with password protection, and link analytics shows when each named recipient opened it. Directors and agency producers can leave threaded comments through a shared link without signing up. Timestamped comments and drawing on video and images are coming soon; for now Fabric suits sharing and gathering notes alongside a dedicated frame-accurate review tool. There is more on that set-up in review and approval.

Password protection and link analytics are included on Pro and Team plans. See plans for teams.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best VFX studio in Los Angeles?

It depends on the project. For large features, Digital Domain and Framestore have the deepest records. For episodic work, FOLKS and Crafty Apes both had Emmy-nominated effects in 2026. For commercials, MakeMake (formerly a52) is the most established LA name.

What happened to The Mill and MPC in Los Angeles?

Technicolor Group closed its US offices in February 2025, which shut The Mill and MPC in Los Angeles. TransPerfect bought both brands, relaunched The Mill in October 2025 with studios in London, Paris, Seoul and Bangalore, and merged MPC into it in June 2026. TransPerfect has said it plans to return to the US, but there is no Los Angeles studio yet.

What happened to FuseFX?

FuseFX rebranded as FOLKS in February 2025. Both were already owned by Pitch Black, and all former FuseFX studios, including Los Angeles, now operate as FOLKS, with a new office in Burbank.

Is Scanline VFX still operating?

Yes, under a new name. Netflix merged Scanline VFX with Eyeline Studios in October 2025, and the combined studio trades as Eyeline, with an office in Los Angeles.

Do Los Angeles VFX studios also do colour and editing?

Some do. MakeMake offers editing, design, colour and VFX under one roof, and Framestore's group includes the colour company Company 3. Many productions still hire separately, and our list of post-production companies in Los Angeles covers full-service houses.

Related lists

VFX studios in other cities: New York · London · San Francisco · Toronto · Sydney

More in Los Angeles: Creative agencies · Post-production · Animation studios · Colour grading · Editing · Video production

Run your studio on Fabric: Fabric for creative teams · Best video asset management tools · Best creative proofing tools