California waves some shiny new tax credits at a skittish Hollywood

Last year, Newsom signed a $420 million annual expansion to the state’s tax incentive program for filmmakers; now he’s signed two new laws intended to extend the credits to folks like editors and film composers on the one hand, and keep existing credits safe from his own state legislators on the other. Per THR, the more fiscally dense of the two laws was a bill meant to help Hollywood circumvent overall caps on tax credits put into play by California’s state legislature earlier this year; the new law both extends protections from those caps, and makes it both easier and faster for producers to monetize their credits. (Not being accountants or tax law experts ourselves, we’ll note that the language in question is pretty aggressively dense—but film production advocate groups were pretty excited about it, so we assume it’s to their liking.)

In that same flurry of pen signings, Newsom also created a brand new credit: A $10 million credit specifically allocated for projects that shot outside of California, but which had their post-production work—scoring, editing, and all those other bits of making a movie that don’t take place on set—done inside the state. Again, Newsom and his lawmakers are playing a bit of catch-up here: States like New York, New Jersey, Georgia, and New Mexico have all already rolled out similar credits to encourage studios to seek post-production work within their borders, even on projects filmed outside those states. The new law has been praised by representatives for groups like the Motion Pictures Editors Guild and the California Post Alliance.

None of this, of course, touches directly on the fight Newsom finds himself in the middle of over Paramount, which isn’t going to stay put in its hometown by some additional tax incentives if it doesn’t get its big, expensive merger. But it does speak to how much California is clearly worried about losing its reputation as the place where movies get made, rather than just the offices where the people who tell other people to go make them are housed.