Production
California Eyes Major Expansion of $750 Million Film and TV Production Incentive Program
By Ledger Staff · Oct 30, 2026
New York Production Spend Jumps 87% as Brooklyn and Queens Soundstages Run Full
A sweetened state incentive and a post-strike rush of work have New York production spending closing in on California, with the city's busiest stages booked into next summer.
By Ledger Staff ·
New York production spend rose 87% to $1.61 billion in the third quarter of 2026, outpacing every other U.S. state, according to data platform ProdPro, after a 54% jump in the second quarter.
That surge has narrowed the gap with California, still the largest U.S. market, where spending rose 17% to $1.76 billion — a difference New York City Film Commissioner Rafael Espinal, seated in February by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, notes gleefully is about the size of a major motion picture, adding, "We'll get there."
The rebound traces to an enhanced incentive package in New York State's FY26 budget that runs through 2036: a base 30% credit with regional step-ups, annual funding raised from $700 million to $800 million, up to 10% more through a Production Plus program for larger projects, the removal of a $500,000 cap on per-person above-the-line labor costs, and a new rule letting producers claim the full credit in the first year rather than over three.
"We are bursting at the seams again, which hadn't been the case for two, three years," Doug Steiner, chairman of Steiner Studios, told Deadline, as his Brooklyn Navy Yard complex — home to The Diplomat and Disclosure Day — booked out through next summer with 1,500 to 2,000 people on site on a given day across roughly 30 stages.
In Astoria, Queens, Wildflower Studios, which opened in the fall of 2024, recently counted around 725 people on site, its highest to date, and now carries a waitlist of productions after housing Universal's Focker-in-Law, Severance and Mike Flanagan's The Exorcist: Martyrs.
Permit tallies from the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment, which exclude soundstage work, show on-location activity up 21% on average from January through September 2026 against the same months of 2025, with June through September the highest since pre-strike 2022, while New York City accounts for about 80% of state production.
Georgia was ProdPro's No. 3 market, up 32% to $459 million, while New Jersey, New Mexico and Illinois all declined, even as New Jersey capacity approaches with Lionsgate Studios Newark slated for 2027, Skydance anchoring the 1888 Studios campus in Bayonne and Netflix developing an East Coast hub at the former Fort Monmouth base.
The recovery has not lifted every facility — Deutsche Bank filed a foreclosure complaint against Kaufman Astoria Studios over a $340 million loan, and Shadowbox Studios now manages that campus — leaving one longtime industry executive to ask, "Is this the new norm, or will it go backwards again?"