Does Marvel Studios Have A Company Town Funded By Dan T Cathy

Marvel Studios workers who may have no work-life balance (and this is by no means a Marvel problem, but an industry problem) can now live in a company town that’s a pleasant 10-minute stroll from the studio. And guess what? If the employee or contractor is too tired from their workday to go grocery shopping, a delivery robot will roll up with their weekly order (too bad all the freelancers writing about Marvel don’t get that service too, eh?). The home base for Marvel’s Georgia productions Trilith Studios (formerly Pinewood Atlanta) now has a “wholesome suburban development,” also called Trilith, according to Variety.

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Pinewood’s stake in the studios and town was bought out by River’s Rock Trust in 2020. River’s Rock is the independently managed trust of Chick-fil-A principal Dan T. Cathy and his family. Although Chick-fil-A stopped donating to anti-LGBTQ+ causes in 2019, its owner Dan T. Cathy reportedly didn’t. As Esquire so eloquently put it in an article about the donations, “A man’s product is as good as the man himself.” Although the Cathy-funded four-year-old Trilith development, originally called Pinewood Forest, boasts it’s an innovative, non-generic development, it’s modeled after the building style and British-style village feel of traditional European cities, designed by architects and town planner Lew Oliver Inc.

The city was created using the concept of New Urbanism, which Variety describes as “a concept that means neighborhoods should be walkable and compact, with varied building types and less emphasis on cars — basically the polar opposite of the vast majority of tract house developments across the country.” One of the main goals of the new type of development is to minimize the environmental impact of human day-to-day living, although research into whether that is the case is still sparse.

Not All Trilith Residents Are in Entertainment

     Marvel Studios  

Not everyone who lives at Trilith works in entertainment. However, a majority of the homes are housed by people that do work in the industry, and maybe that’s because the single-family homes are priced around $700,000 and up (more than twice what homes go for in the surrounding areas, but what homes would go for in LA or NYC, so apparently that justifies messing with the housing market, which will lead to pushing out the surrounding poorer neighborhoods eventually as suburban flight always does). According to Variety’s report, the entertainment industry makeup up of the town consists of “about 30% of single-family home residents and about 70% of apartment dwellers have some association with the productions at Trilith Studios, according to the developer.”

“We’ve got a waiting list,” says Trilith Development president Rob Parker. “If you come from the film industry, it’s easy living.”

Although the Trilith team told Variety, sorry, Marvel fanatics, there are not any streets named after Avengers or any other MCU properties. However, maybe the price tag on the condos and homes are so high because residents may stumble across WandaVision or Family Feud filming on their street. “There’s about a dozen different looks” for shooting in the town, Parker told Variety, who pointed out that Wakanda was built in the open area down the road.