What's Filmed in Albuquerque? Studios, Shows & Why Productions Go

Short answer: a lot. Breaking Bad made Albuquerque famous, Netflix made it permanent, and New Mexico’s film incentive keeps the call sheets coming. The city is now one of the busiest production hubs in the country. A place where streamers own studio lots, network facilities run year-round, and yes, where you can rent a film studio for your own production.

We know the market firsthand: ABQ Castle Studios, our film studio in Albuquerque, operates here. Here’s the full picture. The shows that built the city’s reputation, the studios operating today, and why productions keep choosing New Mexico.

The shows that put Albuquerque on the map

Breaking Bad shot in and around Albuquerque for five seasons, and the city leaned into it: Visit Albuquerque still publishes self-guided tours of the show’s locations. Better Call Saul followed, filming predominantly in Albuquerque across its run and adding a new layer of landmarks to the map. Between the two series, Albuquerque spent more than a decade as one of the most recognizable filming cities on television.

The stages have their own history. The Albuquerque Studios lot, eight sound stages when Netflix bought it, had already hosted productions including The Avengers, Breaking Bad and Sicario before the streamer arrived.

The studios operating in Albuquerque today

Three names come up when people search for film and movie studios in Albuquerque, and they do very different things.

Netflix’s ABQ Studios. In 2018 Netflix bought the Albuquerque Studios complex, the first studio lot the company ever purchased, and made it a U.S. production hub. In 2024 it unveiled a major expansion: a campus of more than 100 acres with four new soundstages, mills, stage-support buildings and dedicated backlot areas. Recent series shot on the lot include Ransom Canyon, Pulse and The Boroughs.

NBCUniversal’s Albuquerque studio. Announced in 2019, NBCUniversal converted a warehouse just north of downtown into an 84,000-square-foot television and film facility with two sound stages, offices and a mill, a long-term commitment to producing in New Mexico.

ABQ Castle Studios. Our stage at 8610 President Pl NE is the virtual production option, one of the largest virtual production stages in the world, and a different tool than a traditional sound stage. Instead of building sets or moving the company between locations, productions load photoreal environments and shoot them live, in camera. KOAT featured the facility in an Oscars-night story.

Why productions choose New Mexico

The short answer is the incentive. New Mexico runs one of the most aggressive production incentives in the country: a 25% base credit on qualified production expenses paid in-state, plus a 5% uplift for productions that shoot at a Qualified Production Facility: a 30% refundable credit in total. Refundable is the word that matters: once a qualifying production’s spend is reviewed and approved, the state pays the credit out. It isn’t just a deduction against taxes you happen to owe in New Mexico.

The eligibility rules, qualified-expense definitions and application process are administered by the New Mexico Film Office, and any production should run its budget past an accountant who knows the program. But the structure explains the landscape: the 5% difference between 25% and 30% is tied to where you put your studio days, which is exactly why studio infrastructure keeps growing here. We’ve written a full guide to how the New Mexico film tax credit works.

The incentive built a second advantage on top of itself: nearly two decades of steady production has trained a deep New Mexico crew base. Productions that come for the credit find experienced local department heads waiting when they arrive. And hiring them keeps more spend on the qualified ledger.

The virtual production option: any location, without leaving the stage

Most of Albuquerque’s stages work the traditional way. You rent empty space and bring the production to fill it. ABQ Castle Studios works differently. It runs the same CastleVision pipeline as our Burbank studio: green screen, Unreal Engine, and Ultimatte keyers compositing the environment live, in camera. We pioneered real-time virtual production in 2007, and the method is now patented. It’s virtual production beyond LED walls, the environment isn’t displayed behind the talent on a screen; it’s rendered photoreal and married to the camera in real time, so what you record is the finished shot.

The practical effect: any of 250+ ready-to-film sets loads in seconds. A classic motel very much in the New Mexico idiom, a city street, a courtroom, a newsroom, a spaceship, every standing set from our Burbank stage is available in Albuquerque, and physical props and foreground furniture blend straight into the virtual environments. The building supports it all with extensive parking, plenty of dressing rooms and green rooms, easy load-in, current cinema equipment, and a full furniture warehouse for on-set props.

Two more things producers ask about. First, crew: the virtual system operator is always included in the rate, so the pipeline is staffed and running the moment you arrive, and an optional crew package adds camera and teleprompter operators. Second, paperwork: no film permit is required to shoot at the Albuquerque stage. The location work happens on the stage, so there’s nothing to permit, no company move, and no location to lock down.

And because ABQ Castle Studios holds New Mexico’s Qualified Production Facility designation, studio days here count toward the 30% track of the credit rather than the 25% base. The stage that saves the location budget is the same stage that earns the uplift.

Planning a shoot in Albuquerque?

If you’re weighing Albuquerque for a production, film or TV scenes, a talk show, news, commercials, or something the location scout said was impossible, start with ABQ Castle Studios, the virtual production option among the film studios in Albuquerque. Tours run by appointment, and we’ll model your production against the New Mexico rebate while you’re on the floor. Get in touch and we’ll walk you through it.