There’s one conversation everyone in Hollywood is having right now: that a production comeback is on the horizon. State tax incentives, new legislation and streamlined local permits have all been credited with pulling productions back to Los Angeles, after years of cities like Atlanta, New Orleans and Toronto capitalizing on lower costs. But is anything actually changing, or is this just a marketing line to get more productions back?
The optimists have real numbers to point to. This past March, The Pitt star Noah Wyle attended a hearing in Burbank, organized by Senator Adam Schiff, in support of bringing productions back to Hollywood. Wyle said the first season of The Pitt brought $125 million back to California.
The Baywatch reboot shoots here. So do multicam sitcoms like Happy’s Place. The reason any of this registers as a win is that the losses ran so deep for so long.
Productions first left for other American cities chasing lower costs, and now they’re increasingly leaving the country entirely, where union restrictions are lighter and the incentives are bigger. Consider the biggest film in the world at the moment: Spider-Man: Brand New Day is set in New York City and was shot mainly in London, where it could benefit from the U.K.’s generous tax incentives. It also helps that this is an election year.
Candidates in both the California gubernatorial race and the Los Angeles mayor’s race have turned Hollywood production into a reliable talking point. At a mayoral debate in May, Councilmember Nithya Raman accused Mayor Karen Bass of making the city’s already labyrinthine permitting process harder to navigate, citing Baywatch specifically. Baywatch has been held up as proof of concept by studio executives and Governor Gavin Newsom alike, and the production still ran into trouble almost immediately in the City of Angels.
The problems got solved, eventually. Is that a repeatable recipe for every production hoping to shoot here? There are only so many tax credits to go around.
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