Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to pump another quarter-billion dollars a year into California's film and television tax credit program, proposing an expansion from $750 million to at least $1 billion annually. The plan would also expand the program to cover above-the-line compensation, rather than limiting credits to production costs.
The proposal, detailed Monday, would reserve $100 million annually specifically for independent productions and extend the tax credit through 2040, a decade past the current program's scheduled 2030 sunset, according to Politico. Companies that commit to filming more than one production in California would also get a 5% boost in credits under the plan, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. If enacted, the credit would become the nation's largest capped film and television tax incentive, per the same Times report.
A Program Still Trying to Prove Itself
This would mark the second major expansion of California's incentive program in just two years. The state had already raised its annual credit from $330 million to $750 million in 2025, a jump that, per Variety, was supposed to stop the bleeding of production work to other states and countries. In the first year under that bigger program, the credit generated more than $8 billion in direct production spending and helped create over 43,000 jobs, with film shoot days jumping 52% year over year, the Times reports.
But the numbers since then tell a more complicated story. FilmLA data cited by the Times show Los Angeles-area shoot days between July and September fell 4.8% from the same period last year and sat nearly 29% below the five-year average. Earlier in the year, the picture was rougher still: feature-film shoots in Greater LA dropped 20% year over year in the second quarter, while television production cratered 30%, according to the Times' own newsletter coverage of the industry's struggles.
Other outlets reported different third-quarter decline figures for California production — Indiewire cited a 3.7% drop, while Screen Daily cited a 4.8% year-on-year decline in shooting days for the same quarter, underscoring how unevenly the slump is being measured depending on geography and category.
Jobs Keep Disappearing Despite the Credit
The stakes behind Newsom's push are concrete: Los Angeles County lost more than 42,000 motion picture industry jobs between 2022 and 2024, Politico reports, even as film and television projects continued moving to other states and countries offering richer incentives. Variety's analysis of the latest FilmLA report found a silver lining of sorts — 40.2% of scripted shows filming in Los Angeles in the third quarter received the state tax credit, nearly double the share from a year earlier, and the credit reached about 62% of television comedies, up from just 19% in 2025. Reality television, however, continued to struggle, logging just 630 shoot days in the third quarter, 66% below its five-year average, per Variety.
Newsom's proposal also would make above-the-line compensation eligible for production tax credits, bringing California's program closer in line with states like Georgia and Illinois, which have used aggressive incentives to pull productions away from California, Politico notes. Georgia's own film tax credit requires productions to spend at least $500,000 in qualified in-state expenditures to qualify, according to the Georgia Department of Revenue.
Backing From the Film Commission
California Film Commission Director Colleen Bell voiced support for the governor's call to expand the credit beyond $1 billion, saying she is grateful for his leadership on the issue, according to a statement posted on Gov.ca.gov. The California Film Commission describes the existing $750 million program as a five-year commitment running through a sunset date of June 30, 2030, per its own program documentation.
Beyond the state-level push, the proposal arrives alongside a federal question still playing out in Congress. Lawmakers in the House and Senate have introduced the Motion Picture, Television, and Entertainment Revitalization Act and hope to pass it during the upcoming lame-duck session. The bill would establish a federal business tax credit based on a percentage of compensation paid for services performed in the United States tied to a qualified film or television production, according to the bill's text on Congress.gov.
The debate over how much state and federal governments should subsidize entertainment production shows no sign of settling soon — not with California's film and television workforce still searching for the kind of stability that defined the industry for decades.
