Californians are feeling more pain at the pump than any other state as the conflict with Iran pushes up prices.

Spencer Shearer was filling up his Nissan Sentra on Friday morning at the Chevron station in Brentwood near San Vicente and Montana avenues and paying a rate higher than almost anywhere else in the country: $5.55 per gallon.

“It sucks,” Shearer said as he watched his bill on the pump click toward $50.

With the continued conflict in and around Iran, gas prices are rising. In the Los Angeles area and a few places around the San Francisco Bay Area, the cost of gas has cracked $5-per-gallon again and is even tipping toward $6 in a few places.

The spreading conflict in the Persian Gulf has had a predictable but unwelcome impact on California drivers. Californians usually pay far more for gas than people in other states.

Its pole position on prices is continuing with the latest surge.

The average cost of a gallon of regular gas in California is the most expensive in the country at $4.91, up 6% from a week ago and 11% from a month ago, according to AAA. The nationwide average is $3.32 per gallon.

The conflict with Iran has strangled movement through the Persian Gulf and catapulted the price of a barrel of oil.

The prices in California are higher than in other states because of higher taxes and stricter requirements for cleaner, more expensive gas that pollutes less. This has been a festering issue not only for the industry but also for consumers.

Fuel marketers, gas station owners and some voters have blamed Gov. Gavin Newsom’s policies.

Newsom told regulators in 2021 to stop issuing fracking permits and phase out oil extraction by 2045. He also signed a bill allowing local governments to block the construction of oil and gas wells. He seemed to ease his stance last year and signed a bill allowing up to 2,000 new oil wells per year through 2036 in Kern County, which produces about three-fourths of the state’s crude oil.

As a result of the policies that seem aimed at punishing oil producers, California has seen a steady decline in crude oil production, making it more reliant on oil and gasoline supplies outside the state.

In 2024, only 23% of the crude oil refined in the state was pumped in California, with 13% from Alaska and 63% from elsewhere in the world, including about 30% from the Middle East, according to the Western States Petroleum Assn.

The primary reason gas prices in California are high is that refinery closures are reducing local supply while demand has remained high, said Zachary Leary, chief lobbyist at the Western States Petroleum Assn.

“Geopolitical events … show and highlight how fragile it is here in California,” he said.

California’s special gasoline blends are increasingly imported from overseas and can require more than a month to transport, he added.

Supply bottlenecks have been exacerbated by recent refinery closures, including the Phillips 66 refinery in Wilmington in October and the idling and planned closure of the Valero refinery in Benicia, which reduced refining capacity in the state by close to 20%.

It is hard to predict how long this spike in prices will stay, said Severin Borenstein, faculty director of the Energy Institute at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

“We don’t know whether the war will widen or end quickly,” said Borenstein. “Those things will drive the price of crude.”

At the Brentwood gas station, product manager Conner Uretsky, 30, waited as his partner refueled her Toyota Prius ahead of a trip to Palm Springs. Lately, he said, surging fuel costs have made him think twice about going on road trips.

Uretsky, who moved to Los Angeles from the East Coast about six years ago, said he was initially shocked by the region’s high cost of living.

“Gas prices are crazy,” he said.

Paula, a writer who declined to share her last name, said she was “furious” at President Trump’s decision to start a war with Iran, as well as his recent actions in Venezuela and threats against Greenland and Cuba.

“If you look at who’s paying for this war, we are,” she said, pointing to the fuel price flip sign as she waited for her Volvo hybrid SUV to refuel.

Shearer says he has to be more careful with his gas budget. The business analyst tries to find the least expensive gas near his home in Los Angeles. Still, he’s gotten used to California’s high prices.

“It feels almost normal to be paying this amount,” he said.

Times staff writer Laurence Darmiento contributed to this report.

Pop Mart, the Chinese toymaker known for its collectible Labubu dolls, reportedly plans to open a new office building in Culver City as it seeks to expand its North American presence.

The 22,000-square-foot office will serve as Pop Mart’s new U.S. headquarters, according to real estate data provider CoStar, which earlier reported the deal.

Pop Mart, founded in 2010 in Beijing, is credited with fueling the frenzy over “blind boxes” — small, collectible toys sold in packaging that keeps the exact figure inside a surprise until it is unsealed.

The toymaker, which is publicly traded on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, has nearly 600 physical stores across 18 countries, according to its September 2025 half-year financial report.

Much of its recent growth has concentrated in the U.S. In the first half of last year, the company opened 40 new stores, including 19 in the Americas. In Southern California, it now has stores in Westfield Century City, Glendale Galleria, and Westfield UTC Mall in La Jolla.

The office building Pop Mart is moving into, named “Slash,” features leaning glass windows and a distinguishable jagged design. The 1999 building was designed by the Los Angeles architect Eric Owen Moss.

Pop Mart’s decision to root itself in L.A.’s Westside comes amid Culver City’s transformation from a sleepy suburb known for being the home to Sony Pictures Studios — to an urban hub, driven, in part, by the Expo Line station that opened in 2012.

Ikea recently announced plans to open a 40,000-square-foot store in Culver City’s historic Helms Bakery complex — its first in L.A.’s Westside — later this spring.

Big tech has played an important role in Culver City’s recent evolution. Recent additions include Apple, which has opened a studio and has been building a larger office campus; Amazon, which in 2022 unveiled a massive virtual production stage, and Tiktok, which in 2020 opened a five-floor office featuring a content creation studio. Pinterest has a new office in Culver City as of last month, according to the company’s LinkedIn account.

With Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. expected to saddle the combined company with $79 billion in debt, Paramount executives are looking to do away with redundant assets including real estate — and there is a lot of that.

Chief in the public’s imagination are their historic studios in Burbank and Hollywood, where legendary films and television show have been made for generations and continue to operate year-round.

“Both of these studios are in the core [30-mile zone,] the inner circle of where Hollywood talent wants to be,” entertainment property broker Nicole Mihalka of CBRE said. “It’s very prime real estate.”

When Sony and Apollo were bidding for Paramount in early 2024, their plan was to sell the Paramount property, but there is no indication that Paramount would part with its namesake lot.

For now, Paramount’s plan is to keep both studios operating with each studio releasing about 15 films a year, but the goal is to eventually consolidate most of the studio operations around the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank in order to to eliminate redundancies with the Paramount lot on Melrose Avenue, people close to Chief Executive David Ellison said.

Paramount would not look to raze its celebrated studio lot — the oldest operating film studio in Los Angeles — because of various restrictions on historic buildings there. Paramount also has a relatively new post-production facility on site and will likely need to the studio space.

Instead, the plan would be to lease out space for film productions, including those from combined Paramount-HBO streaming operations. Ellison also is considering plans to develop other parts of the 65-acre site for possible retail use, as well as renting space for commercial offices.

The studios’ combined property holdings are vast, and real estate data provider CoStar estimates they have about 12 million square feet of overlapping uses, including their studio campuses, offices and long-term leases in such film centers as Burbank, Hollywood and New York.

Century-old Paramount Pictures Studios is awash in Hollywood history — think Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond desperately trying to enter its famous gate in “Sunset Boulevard,” and other classics such as “The Godfather,” “Titanic” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

The lot, however, is a congested warren of stages, offices, trailers and support facilities such as woodworking mills that date to the early 20th century. The layout is byzantine in part because Paramount bought the former rival RKO studio lot from Desilu Productions to create the lot known today.

Warner Bros. occupies 11 million square feet and owns 14 properties totaling 9.5 million square feet, largely in the United States and United Kingdom, CoStar said. About 3 million square feet of that commercial property is in the Los Angeles area.

The firm’s portfolio also includes the sprawling Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden complex in the U.K. and Turner Broadcasting System headquarters in Atlanta.

Paramount Skydance occupies 8 million square feet and owns 14 properties totaling 2.1 million square feet, according to CoStar. In addition to its Hollywood campus, Paramount’s holdings include prominent buildings in New York such as the Ed Sullivan Theater and CBS Broadcast Center.

Warner Bros. operates a 3-million-square-foot lot in Burbank with more than 30 soundstages — along with space for building sets and backlot areas — where famous movies including “Casablanca” and television shows such as “Friends” were filmed. Paramount’s 1.2-million-square-foot Melrose campus anchors a broader network of owned and leased production space, CoStar said.

Paramount’s lot is already cleared for more development. More than a decade ago, Paramount secured city approval to add 1.4 million square feet to its headquarters and some adjacent properties owned by the company.

The redevelopment plan, valued at $700 million in 2016, underwent years of environmental review and public outreach with neighbors and local business owners.

The plan would allow for construction of up to 1.9 million square feet of new stage, production office, support, office, and retail uses, and the removal of up to 537,600 square feet of existing stage, production office, support, office, and retail uses, for a net increase of nearly 1.4 million square feet.

The proposal preserves elements of the past by focusing future development on specific portions of the lot along Melrose and limited areas in the production core, architecture firm Rios said.

The Warner Bros. and Paramount lots “are two of the most prime pieces of real estate in the country,” Mihalka said. “These are legacy assets with a lot of potential to be [tourist] attractions in addition to working studios.”

Hollywood is still reeling from previous mergers, in addition to a sharp pullback in film and television production locally as filmmakers chase tax credits offered overseas and in other states, including New York and New Jersey.

Last year, lawmakers boosted the annual amount allocated to the state’s film and TV tax credit program and expanded the criteria for eligible projects in an attempt to lure production back to California. So far, more than 100 film and TV projects have been awarded tax credits under the revamped program.

The benefits have been slow to materialize, but Mihalka predicts that the tax credits and desirability of working close to home will lead to more studio use in the Los Angeles area, including at Warner Bros. and Paramount.

“These are such prime locations that we’ll see show runners and talent push back on having shows located out of state and insist on being here,” she said. “I think you’re going to see more positive movement here.”

Times staff writer Meg James contributed to this report.