Since Talaat Captan opened Air Hollywood in 2001, its airplane cabins, cockpits and terminal sets have appeared in a long list of feature films, TV series and commercials. Audiences rarely notice: the point of a good aviation set is that nobody wonders whether the plane was real. This guide gathers the productions that Air Hollywood’s own press releases and archived press coverage name, organized by era, with a note on where each credit comes from.
It is not a complete filmography. In a 2012 New York Times feature, Captan put the number of films shot at the studio since it opened at more than 500, and many smaller shoots, commercials and music videos are never announced. The titles below are the ones that have been named publicly.
The early years: proving the idea (2001–2004)
Air Hollywood grew out of a hard lesson on the set of Ground Control, the 1998 feature Captan produced, when a filming permit at LAX was withdrawn at the last minute. We tell that story in How Talaat Captan Turned a Ground Control Setback into Air Hollywood. Within a few years of opening, the studio’s sets were being booked by major productions.
- Daredevil, Matchstick Men and Like Mike – listed as Air Hollywood credits in an October 2003 Los Angeles Times feature on the business of renting aviation sets to filmmakers.
- Intolerable Cruelty – the same Los Angeles Times article described a lavish private jet set, complete with a working miniature railroad between cabins, that Air Hollywood rented to the Coen brothers. The studio’s general manager told the paper that the scene was ultimately cut from the film.
- Soul Plane – in April 2003 MGM chose Air Hollywood for the comedy. According to the studio’s announcement, an estimated 90 percent of the film would take place on its airplane mock-ups and airport standing sets, and the studio earned a title credit. Captan described it at the time as a leading role for the company rather than a cameo.
- Just Married, The Terminal, Surviving Christmas and A Lot Like Love – named in a 2004 Air Hollywood press release as earlier studio projects, including work for 20th Century Fox, DreamWorks and Disney.
A wide-body for a thriller: Red Eye and its era (2004–2007)
In October 2004 Air Hollywood announced that it would supply a 120-foot wide-body airplane mock-up to DreamWorks and director Wes Craven for the aviation thriller Red Eye. The release noted that filming was scheduled on the studio’s set from November 2004 into January 2005, and that the project was its most involved collaboration with DreamWorks to date. The same release also named Paramount’s Elizabethtown among the studio’s credits.
A thriller like Red Eye shows why a dedicated set matters. A director can spend weeks inside a cabin, remove walls and ceiling panels for camera angles, and control light and sound in a way that is impossible on a working aircraft. We explain those techniques in more depth in How Hollywood Films Airplane Scenes Without a Real Plane.
Bigger studio films and television (2008–2013)
After the studio moved its headquarters to a Hollywood lot in 2007 and later settled into a row of stages in Pacoima, its client list grew. Coverage and releases from this period name:
- Moneyball and Charlie Wilson’s War – the 2012 New York Times feature reported that the airplane scenes for both films were shot on Air Hollywood planes.
- Bridesmaids, 7500, The Wolf of Wall Street and Warm Bodies – named as recent work in Air Hollywood’s March 2013 announcement of its joint venture with ARC Aerospace Industries, which gave the studio the exclusive right to promote and rent ARC’s fleet of more than one hundred real aircraft to productions.
- Television – the same announcement listed The Newsroom, NCIS: Los Angeles, Body of Proof and Grey’s Anatomy among the studio’s TV credits.
- Flight – a 2012 profile in The Location Guide listed it, alongside Moneyball and Red Eye, among recent films made at the facility.
Commercials and a famous cockpit
Much of a studio’s work never reaches cinemas. The 2012 Location Guide profile noted that brands including McDonald’s, Nationwide and Virgin had filmed commercials at Air Hollywood. In 2013, two stars of the 1980 comedy Airplane! reunited in a cockpit at the studio for a tourism advertising campaign, a photo opportunity covered by NBC News.
That connection runs deeper than a single shoot. Air Hollywood’s Some of Our Work page states that its Vintage Analog Cockpit is the actual Convair 880 cockpit mock-up used in Airplane!. It is a good example of something Captan has done throughout his career: keeping pieces of aviation and film history in working use rather than in storage, a theme covered in our post on preserving aviation history through props.
Why the list keeps growing
Every production on this list needed the same thing: a believable airplane or airport that a crew could control completely. In the 2012 Times interview, Captan observed that audiences are often surprised to learn how many films include a plane at all. That is the quiet success of the studio he built. The sets are designed to disappear on screen.
The work continues. In October 2026 Air Hollywood announced plans to move to a 17,000-square-foot sound stage in Valencia, California, part of a story traced in our Air Hollywood milestones timeline. For Captan’s own producing credits, including Ground Control, see the film section of this site, and for a short biography visit the founder page on airhollywood.com.
