Newsom wants $1bn in film credits. Without them, LA filming fell 11%

Strip the subsidised shoots out of FilmLA's latest count and filming in Los Angeles fell 11.4% in the third quarter. Productions backed by California's film and television tax credit logged 505 shoot days between July and September, up from 242 in the same months last year. Everything else, the features, series and commercials shooting without state help, fell from 4,138 days to 3,666. The headline total of 4,171 days, down 4.8%, is the flattering version.

That arithmetic sits underneath the announcement Gavin Newsom made on Monday. The governor proposed raising the credit from $750m a year, a level he signed into law sixteen months ago, to at least $1bn, and extending the programme through 2040. The current authorisation runs to 2030. He made the proposal on the eve of the midterms, the day before Californians elect his successor.

What $1bn would actually change

The cap is not the interesting part. For the first time since the programme began in 2009, the credit would cover above-the-line costs, the fees paid to directors, producers and cast, Screen Daily reports. It would reserve $100m a year for independent film and add a 5% bonus for companies that commit at least two productions to the state, per TheWrap.

Excluding star salaries is how California has kept its cost per subsidised job down for seventeen years. Covering them bids for the thing that actually decides where a big film lands, and it makes every subsidised dollar buy fewer jobs. That trade is the real policy change, and the announcement does not price it.

"At least $1 billion in tax credits means more investment flowing into our economy and more opportunity across the industry," Newsom said in the announcement.

At $1bn, California would run the largest capped incentive in the country. Georgia, the state that takes most of the work that leaves, caps nothing.

A bigger share of a smaller business

The credit works where it applies. FilmLA's third-quarter report, published on 21 October, has TV comedy up 143% to 192 shoot days, 62% of them on subsidised projects. TV drama fell 9.4% to 494 days, but the subsidised share of it jumped from 20.6% to 49.4%. Half the dramas shooting in Los Angeles are now there because the state pays.

Incentivised projects made up 40.3% of all scripted on-location filming in the county, nearly double their share a year earlier. Features were the one category the governor can claim without an asterisk: 533 shoot days, up 2.1% on last year, with the subsidised share edging from 22% to 24.2%. Commercials, which get no credit, fell 15.9%. Reality fell 2.9%. Denise Gutches, FilmLA's chief executive, said overall production "remains far below where Los Angeles needs it to be".

Newsom's office counts differently. Its announcement credits the 2025 expansion with $8.25bn in direct production spending, more than 43,000 cast and crew jobs, and a 52% rise in film shoot days. Both sets of figures are true. The governor's measure the subsidised slice; FilmLA counts the whole business, and the whole business is still shrinking. The credit is buying California a larger share of a smaller industry. That is not nothing. It is also not a recovery.

The same announcement says the programme has generated $35.4bn in economic activity and supported more than 248,000 cast and crew jobs since 2009, and that every dollar of credit has returned $24.40 in economic output. A 24-to-1 return would make this the best investment the state of California makes anywhere. Those are the programme's own figures, compiled to argue for the programme, and they should be read that way.

Tenfold in seventeen years

California's incentive began in 2009 at $100m a year, allocated by lottery. Jerry Brown tripled it to $330m in September 2014 and replaced the lottery with a jobs-based ranking. Newsom took it to $750m in the budget he signed on 2 July 2025, a $3.75bn commitment over five years, and a day later signed AB 1138, which lifted the base credit to 35% and the per-production cap to $120m.

The case for the 2025 rise was unmet demand. More productions applied than the fund could pay, and the governor's office said at the time that 69% of the rejected projects went on to shoot outside the state. The case for this one is thinner, because the bigger fund has now existed through five quarters of FilmLA reports and the county's totals are still going down.

Now, sixteen months on, at least $1bn. A cap that stood at $330m in June 2025 would have tripled. Each rise was sold as the one that keeps the work home, and the work keeps leaving: American Idol, a series about Hollywood if ever there was one, moved production to Georgia this year even though Georgia's rebate pays a lower rate than California's.

Somebody else's cheque to write

Newsom is termed out. He leaves office in January, and a credit written through 2040 would run fourteen years past his exit. The proposal needs the legislature, and it needs a governor Californians have not yet chosen. Nothing announced on Monday binds either of them.

He also renewed his call for Congress to pass the Motion Picture, Television and Entertainment Revitalization Act, the federal production incentive introduced in September, by the end of the year. "States can't shoulder the cost alone, which is why I am calling on Congress to back up an expanded tax credit by passing national film and TV tax credit legislation," he said. The bill was introduced in September with sponsors from both parties and has sat since. Senator Adam Schiff has called it close, and named the White House as the risk to it. Nothing moves in Congress before Tuesday either.

The polls close on Tuesday night. The next state budget, the first that could carry a $1bn credit, is presented in Sacramento in January by whoever wins.