Oscars to Leave Hollywood Boulevard for Downtown L.A. in 2029, Move to YouTube Streaming

On Oscars night, Hollywood Boulevard has long functioned as a sealed-off stage set: tourists pressed against barricades, spotlights raking the sky, a red carpet threading past the Walk of Fame into the Dolby Theatre, cameras beaming images around the world.

Beginning in 2029, that scene will disappear.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is moving the Academy Awards ceremony from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood to the Peacock Theater at L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles under a new 10-year agreement with Anschutz Entertainment Group, which owns and operates the L.A. Live complex. The Associated Press first reported the deal on March 26.

The shift will coincide with another break from tradition: that same year, the Oscars telecast will leave ABC, its broadcast home since 1976, for an exclusive global streaming deal on YouTube.

Taken together, the two moves will end the Oscars’ longest-ever run at a single venue, take Hollywood’s signature awards night off Hollywood Boulevard, and reposition one of television’s most venerable live events as a streaming-first spectacle staged on a downtown sports-and-entertainment campus.

A decade-long move, nine miles away

Under the agreement with AEG, the Oscars will relocate to the 7,000-seat Peacock Theater starting with the 101st Academy Awards in 2029 and are expected to remain there through 2039. The Dolby Theatre, which opened in 2001 as the Kodak Theatre and has hosted the Oscars every year since 2002 except for a pandemic-era detour to Union Station in 2021, will continue to be the ceremony’s home through the 100th ceremony in 2028.

The two venues are separated by roughly nine miles. Symbolically, the distance is greater.

The Dolby sits inside the Ovation Hollywood complex at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, steps from the TCL Chinese Theatre and the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was developed with the Academy’s involvement specifically to house the Oscars and anchor a broader Hollywood redevelopment effort. By contrast, the Peacock Theater is part of L.A. Live, a dense cluster of arenas, hotels and restaurants in downtown Los Angeles’ South Park neighborhood, adjacent to Crypto.com Arena, home of the Los Angeles Lakers, Clippers and Kings.

Academy chief executive Bill Kramer and Academy president Lynette Howell Taylor said in a statement that they are “thrilled that the Academy Awards will have a new home at the Peacock Theater at L.A. Live beginning with our 101st ceremony” and called the complex “the perfect backdrop for our global celebration of cinema.”

AEG has said it will undertake significant upgrades to the theater and its technology infrastructure before the Oscars arrive, and will work with the Academy on “bespoke design elements” tailored to the show’s needs. Those improvements are expected to encompass production, staging and audience experience inside the venue, as well as red-carpet and media areas on the surrounding plazas.

A return downtown — to a different downtown

The Oscars have bounced between hotels and theaters across Los Angeles since the first Academy Awards banquet at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in 1929. For nearly two decades, starting in 1968, the ceremony was closely associated with downtown’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center, a formal concert hall that became synonymous with Oscar night until the mid-1980s.

From 1968 through 1986, and in several subsequent years, television viewers around the world saw winners accept their statuettes against the Dorothy Chandler’s distinctive proscenium. In those years, downtown Los Angeles was more often framed as a civic and cultural center, lined with government buildings and performing arts venues.

With the move to L.A. Live, the awards will again be based downtown, but in a very different environment. The 27-acre complex, developed by AEG, includes Crypto.com Arena, the Peacock Theater, the Grammy Museum, hotels operated under the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton brands, restaurants, bars and large open plazas dominated by digital billboards.

The site already hosts the Grammy Awards, many Primetime Emmy Awards ceremonies, and high-profile sporting events. During the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, it is expected to serve as a focal point for basketball and other competitions.

The Peacock Theater, which opened in 2007 as Nokia Theatre L.A. Live and was later known as Microsoft Theater, has become a familiar stage for televised events, including repeated editions of the Emmys and the BET Awards. NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock acquired naming rights to the venue in 2023, rebranding both the theater and an adjacent outdoor plaza.

The Oscars’ move adds the film industry’s most visible awards show to a schedule already packed with concerts, sports and other live broadcasts, further concentrating Los Angeles’ major televised events in a single downtown campus.

A larger room, a bigger canvas

One immediate difference between the Dolby and the Peacock is scale. The Dolby Theatre seats about 3,300 people. The Peacock Theater holds roughly 7,000, giving the Academy a chance to nearly double the in-person audience.

More seats mean more flexibility: room for additional Academy members, international film delegations and corporate partners. The larger footprint at L.A. Live also allows for expanded red-carpet routes, fan viewing areas and sponsor activations in outdoor plazas that have been tested during the Grammys and major sporting events.

Logistically, L.A. Live is designed to handle the churn of high-attendance events. The complex sits next to multiple freeways and within walking distance of the Pico and 7th Street/Metro Center rail stations, and its hotel towers rise directly above the venues. Security perimeters and traffic shutdowns are routine when professional basketball, hockey and A-list concerts overlap.

Ovation Hollywood, by contrast, is a multilevel shopping and entertainment mall along a busy tourist corridor, where each Oscars ceremony requires the closure of a section of Hollywood Boulevard and extensive reconfiguration of a confined urban space for red carpets, bleachers and press.

Event organizers have long used both areas successfully, but the Academy’s new agreement allows it to graft its show onto a campus purpose-built for recurring mega-events.

A telecast leaves broadcast TV

Behind the scenes, the venue move is tightly intertwined with changes in how the ceremony will reach audiences.

In December 2025, the Academy announced a multi-year agreement with YouTube that will make the Oscars available live and free worldwide on the video platform beginning in 2029. The deal, which runs through the 103rd ceremony in 2033, will end nearly five decades of Oscars broadcasts on ABC and make the Academy Awards the first of the major American entertainment awards shows to air exclusively on a digital platform rather than a traditional network.

The Oscars first aired on television in 1953. ABC became the exclusive U.S. broadcaster in 1976 and extended its rights several times even as viewership declined in the era of streaming. Recent telecasts have drawn far smaller domestic audiences than the show commanded in the 1990s and early 2000s, a trend shared by many live, non-sports programs.

The Academy’s leaders have presented the YouTube deal as a way to broaden global access and reach younger viewers, emphasizing that audiences in countries without local broadcast partners will be able to watch the ceremony live online.

The move also situates the Oscars within a growing slate of premium live events on big technology platforms. YouTube has invested in NFL Sunday Ticket and other sports properties, while rivals such as Amazon and Apple have acquired rights to professional football, baseball and soccer.

The result in 2029 will be a ceremony mounted inside a larger, more technologically updated theater in an arena-style complex, carried not on a network owned by a legacy studio but on a platform used daily by billions of people.

Shifting benefits and identities

Relocating the Oscars will have concrete effects on different parts of Los Angeles and the businesses that surround the event.

Hollywood’s Ovation complex and the surrounding neighborhood will lose the annual influx of nominees, studio executives, journalists and promotional dollars that cluster around the Dolby in the weeks leading up to the show. Nearby hotels and restaurants, as well as street vendors and souvenir shops along Hollywood Boulevard, have historically benefited from the closure and transformation of the street into a global television stage.

Downtown businesses near L.A. Live stand to gain that influx. The area already sees surges tied to NBA and NHL seasons, the Grammys and other events. Adding the Oscars to that calendar will increase demand for premium hotel rooms, dining and corporate hospitality packages clustered within a few blocks of the venues.

The move may also sharpen a long-running rivalry between Hollywood and downtown over which neighborhood represents the city’s public face.

For decades, Hollywood Boulevard has been marketed worldwide as the symbolic home of the movie industry, even as most studios operate from soundstages and offices scattered across the region. Downtown’s bid to establish itself as Los Angeles’ primary civic and entertainment hub has accelerated with the growth of L.A. Live, the revival of the historic core and preparations for the Olympics.

City officials have not yet published formal projections of the economic impact of the Oscars’ relocation, but tourism agencies and business groups are expected to study the shift as part of broader assessments of downtown’s role in the region’s visitor economy.

A ceremony between eras

For the Academy, the move to the Peacock Theater and YouTube represents both continuity and change. The Oscars will remain in Los Angeles, within a few miles of the Hollywood landmarks that helped create their aura. The show will still unfold on a proscenium stage before an audience of actors, directors and craftspeople, honoring achievements in film.

Yet the break with Hollywood Boulevard and network television marks a decisive turn away from the conditions that defined the modern Oscars for half a century. After the 100th ceremony in 2028, the Dolby Theatre’s gold-toned auditorium will go dark on Oscars night, and the red carpet will roll out instead across the concrete and LED screens of L.A. Live.

When the 101st Academy Awards take place downtown in 2029, viewers will watch from phones, tablets and smart TVs rather than exclusively through a broadcast signal. Outside, fans will gather under digital billboards bearing the logo of one streaming service while the show itself is carried by another. The image of Hollywood’s most famous statuette will travel not from a network’s control room, but from a global video platform’s servers — a familiar ceremony reshaped by a city and an industry that have moved on from the places and technologies that once defined them.