The Oscars are officially packing their bags for downtown. The Academy announced Thursday that the live awards ceremony will relocate from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood to the Peacock Theater at L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles starting with the 101st Academy Awards in 2029. The timing lines up with a scheduled change in the show’s distribution partner in the same year, setting up a full reset of where and how Hollywood’s biggest night plays out.
Deal and timeline
As first reported by Bloomberg, the Academy’s long-running arrangement with the Dolby Theatre is scheduled to end after the 100th ceremony in 2028. The 101st Oscars in 2029 are set to land at the Peacock Theater in downtown Los Angeles instead. Bloomberg outlined the timeline and contractual choices that ultimately nudged the show away from its Hollywood Boulevard home.
AEG partnership and upgrades
The Academy has reached a reported multi-year agreement with AEG, operator of the L.A. Live complex. Under that deal, AEG will partner on substantial technical and production upgrades at the Peacock Theater so the venue can handle the full scale of the Oscars, according to AP News. The arrangement is framed as a long-term partnership designed to keep the ceremony’s production values intact even as it settles into a very different space.
Downtown's bigger stage
The Peacock Theater is a purpose-built, large-scale entertainment hall inside the L.A. Live campus. It seats roughly 7,100 and sits right next to Crypto.com Arena, giving the Oscars a much different physical footprint than the Dolby Theatre, per L.A. Live. That extra room, plus the open Peacock Place outside the venue, could open the door to expanded fan-facing activations, red-carpet staging and broadcast setups in ways the narrower Hollywood corridor has not allowed.
What it means for Hollywood
For years, the Dolby Theatre and Hollywood Boulevard have served as the street-level face of Oscars week, with press risers, sweeping street closures and a crush of tourists and media squeezed into a tight corridor. Local coverage of recent setup and closure plans shows just how thoroughly the neighborhood is reconfigured each year for the red carpet, a routine that will now have to adapt if the show’s center of gravity moves downtown. ABC7 Los Angeles has documented the kind of road and transit changes the event typically triggers.
Broadcast shake-up
The venue move lines up with a separate broadcast shift already on the calendar. In a December 2025 press release, the Academy announced a multi-year partnership with YouTube that will give the platform exclusive global rights to the Oscars beginning with the 101st ceremony in 2029. The Academy stated that ABC will continue to air the show through the 100th ceremony in 2028 and that YouTube will carry expanded behind-the-scenes programming and year-round Academy content, according to the Academy press release.
What to expect next
AEG and the Academy say planning and upgrade work will follow, giving production teams, city agencies and nearby businesses time to adjust to a downtown-centric show that could look and feel different from the Dolby-era Oscars. For now, the Dolby Theatre remains the ceremony’s home through 2028, while the Academy, AEG and city officials sort out the logistics of moving Hollywood’s most high-profile night into the heart of downtown Los Angeles.
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