Best described as a large film shed rather than a full-blown studio, it will be built near the airport at Frankton’s Remarkables Park.
It will be able to house indoor sets, production offices and wardrobe and art departments.
Called "Frame", the hub is the brainchild of Queenstown cinematographer and director of photography Heath Patterson, and his family trust, who had secured a site 200m north of SITE Trampoline.
"The plan is to start building within the next few months and hopefully be up and running by October/November this year," Mr Patterson said.
"We’re accommodating the Queenstown film industry and just hoping it will bring more work."
Mr Patterson, who is about to file for resource consent, said he had been planning the facility for about a year.
"We totally need it for our industry, which is actually quite big.
"Productions can all be housed in one roof so there’s not this jumping around between buildings in industrial areas and making good of what they can find."
He was adopting a "build it and they will come" philosophy.
"It’s just under 1200sq m and it really is just a big space we’re providing.
"It will have a little office space to the side, but it’s very small."
Mr Patterson said the building "will be engineered in a way we can do whatever we like with it".
"It can be many things, it’s whatever the person who hires it wants to do with it."
The only rule is they take out whatever they put in.
"We’re not providing anything else like lighting, we’re not providing anything Queenstown already has."
Mr Patterson said they had not specifically looked at the space as a post-production facility, "but it’s definitely on the cards".
Due to "some element of secrecy" in the film industry, he expected producers would hire the whole facility, "but if we’re talking about building interior walls temporarily to split up two productions, that’s totally something we could do".
"We’ll just see what the industry throws at us."
Mr Patterson — a former pro snowboarder who had shot for television commercials, web advertising, reality television, Netflix and a bit of feature film work since 2011 — said his motivation was "to help the industry that has brought me up and all my friends in the film industry family that I know in the area".
He did not see plans for another international film studio in Wanaka posing any threat.
"We’ll be right next to an international airport, and we’re closer to Milford Sound and Glenorchy."
The extra hour’s travel to Wanaka could also deter producers "looking for a way to shave any money off their production", he said.
Queenstown’s Brett Mills, who had hired out gear to the industry since 1987, said Mr Patterson’s proposal was "a fantastic, benevolent contribution to the local industry".
Last year, Philip Smith, the founder and owner of Great Southern Television, which has a presence in Queenstown and brought television crime drama series One Lane Bridge to the resort, told Mountain Scene the Wakatipu needed such a hub, believing if it existed then, it would be "over-subscribed".
Last month, it was announced Target3D, a multimillion-dollar virtual-production studio, was a tenant in a research and innovation hub under construction in Remarkables Park, helped in part by the government’s Queenstown diversification fund.
