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.
At an Aug. 27 meeting, Shadowbox director Peter Rumbold said the data center would generate $133 million annually in local tax revenue for DeKalb County, according to the Business Chronicle’s reporting. The proposal has drawn opposition, with opponents jeering at public meetings.
A County Already Hitting Pause
The lawsuit lands in the middle of a broader local reckoning over data centers. DeKalb County first enacted a temporary moratorium on new data center applications in July 2025 and has extended it multiple times through March 2027 while planning staff draft stricter rules addressing power, water and health impacts, as Hoodline previously reported. Hoodline has also covered community concerns about data-center impacts.
That local caution sits in tension with state policy. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp vetoed House Bill 1192 on October 15, 2026, a measure that would have paused state sales tax exemptions for high-technology data center equipment for two years, according to the Sierra Club.
For now, Shadowbox’s 651-megawatt ambitions remain tangled in DeKalb’s courts and zoning offices, with the studio’s proposal facing resistance at nearly every turn, Bloomberg reports. Whether the county’s written assurances amount to a binding vested right, or simply a planning miscommunication, is the question a judge will now have to sort out.
