California wants to lure filming back to Hollywood

Call the consigliere and start drafting up paperwork: California has extended Hollywood an offer it hopes they can’t refuse.

State legislators voted on Friday to more than double the cap on the state’s film and TV tax incentives, from $330 million/year to $750 million/year, in a bid to entice fleeing studios to once again film in the Golden State, where production has tanked.

• Los Angeles just wrapped its worst year in three decades for on-location filming in the city, aside from 2020.
• And things aren’t getting any better: The first quarter of this year saw downturns in every category of production compared with the same period in 2024, according to FilmLA, a non-profit that handles film permits for the city and county.

Where are studios going? To greener ($) pastures, AKA one of the other 119-plus jurisdictions around the world that offer some sort of financial filmmaking incentive.

This includes states like New York and Georgia, who offer uncapped tax incentives, but also increasingly countries like Australia, France, and the UK—where it often works out to be cheaper to fly an entire crew of hundreds of Americans to film than use an empty studio down the street.

In other movie news…F1: The Movie zoomed to a better-than-expected opening weekend ($55.6 million domestically; $144 million globally), granting Apple its first major theatrical win.