That's exactly what I thought, but when I used (.*) at the end and used the $1 I kept getting 404. When I made it the way it is now, it worked on my staging site as expected but not on my live site.

I can confirm that on neither site, the following does not work (404 error):

location /old {
rewrite ^/old/(.*)$ /new/$1 permanent;
}

the following will redirect anything from old to the landing page for the new section

location /old {
rewrite ^/old? /new permanent;
}


here is the current config, with prior rewrites before this location block:

location / {
index index.php;
try_files $uri $uri/ @ee;
}

location @ee {
rewrite ^(.*) /index.php?/$1 last;
}

location /old {
rewrite ^/old? /new permanent;
}

I tired to use (.*) and $2 in hopes that the prior $1 wasn't breaking it. Still no luck.