Amidst an ongoing decline in film production in the United States, a survey of film executives conducted by ProdPro revealed that top American production states like California, Georgia and New York did not rank among the Top 5 most preferred locations for studios to shoot.
ProdPro, a film production analytics company, released a new report Thursday with its outlook on physical production for 2025. Among more than 150 studio executives surveyed, the Top 5 production hubs that were named as most preferred to shoot in were, in order: Toronto, the United Kingdom, Vancouver, Central Europe and Australia. California came in sixth, followed by Georgia and New Jersey.
More than 500 crew members from around the world were also asked about their optimism for the industry in the year ahead. Overall, the sentiment was pessimistic with a net negative rating of -23%, with the only production hub with 50% of crew members expressing optimism being Australia. But that far exceeds California, where only around 10% of respondents said they were optimistic.
The 2025 outlook report also broke down the numbers on the failed recovery of the global film/TV industry in 2024 following the preceding year’s strikes, as studios brought the era of “Peak TV” to an end with cutbacks to production spending. While the overall number of productions of TV series and feature films was up 18% from the strike-affected year of 2023, it remained down 11% from 2022.
Committed production spending in these categories reflected a similar trend. Studios spent $42 billion in TV series and feature film production in 2024, up 63% from 2023 but around 12% down from the $47.9 billion spent in 2022.
ProdPro also took a count of production spending in major regions on projects with budgets of at least $40 million. The U.K. saw a slight uptick of around 1% from 2022 to $5.9 billion, while Canada and Australia also saw bumps of 2.8% and 14%, respectively, to $5.4 billion and $2 billion.
The United States, by comparison, still remains the top production country with $14.5 billion in major production spending nationwide in 2024; but that is down 26% from just two years prior.
2025 is expected to be a critical year for the future of California’s production industry, as Gov. Gavin Newsom has thrown his support behind an expansion of the state’s tax credit program and a raise of its cap from $330 million to $750 million.
But in the wake of the Los Angeles wildfires, which are expected to worsen already high costs of living with escalating rents, industry workers in the county have launched the “Stay in LA” campaign, which among other asks calls on California legislators to go even further than Newsom’s proposal and to completely remove the tax credit cap for the next three years.
