Anthony Ippolito stars as Sylvester Stallone in Amazon MGM Studios' 'I Play Rocky,' which filmed in New Jersey. Claire Folger/Amazon MGM Studios Across the United States, the volume of movie and TV on-location production filming slowed in the first quarter of this year, with one state marking an exception: New Jersey.
The Garden State made gains in both filming count (up 45 percent year-over-year) as well as production spend (up 37 percent), while other major markets either saw declines or were relatively flat, according to production intelligence platform ProdPro’s quarterly report released on Tuesday.
The tracking firm attributes New Jersey’s gains to a “surge in episodic activity” as more series shoot in the state that’s been deemed “Hollywood East” due to its mix of tax incentives, studio infrastructure and available crew. And that’s before a trio of major studio complexes are even completed. Netflix is investing $1 billion to build its East coast base with 12 soundstages at the former site of Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Paramount inked a 10-year lease in October to occupy 85,000 square feet of the in-construction 1888 Studios in Bayonne, while Lionsgate is set as the anchor tenant of Great Point Studios in Newark.
Notable features that have filmed in the state include Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi feature Disclosure Day, which is being positioned as a major summer tentpole from Universal when it hits theaters in June. And Amazon MGM’s young Sylvester Stallone biopic I Play Rocky, which will open 50 years after the boxing film originally hit theaters in November, filmed in the state. (“In a normal world we would have shot that movie in New York and Pennsylvania,” the film’s producer, Toby Emmerich, recently told The Hollywood Reporter. “We ended up shooting it in New Jersey because they had the best tax deal.”)
California stayed No. 1 overall with $1.48 billion in production spend that inched up 2 percent year-over-year even as filming count declined by 14 percent, the report’s figures showed. And No. 2 was longtime traditional rival New York, which also saw shoot counts decline by 14 percent while holding production spend essentially flat year-over-year.
Since California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed in to law a doubling of the state’s tax incentive to $750 million annually last year, the state’s film commission has aggressively courted projects from other locales and also incentivized studios to tell stories that center CA locations. (Big ticket tax break projects include a Snoop Dogg biopic filming in Los Angeles, a Baywatch revival shooting at Venice Beach and an Ang Lee-directed Gold Rush movie filming near Sacramento.)
Illinois, a market that hosts three NBC Chicago procedurals as well as FX’s The Bear, started off the year flat as far as filming count and saw a slight uptick in production spend year-over-year, ProdPro figures show. The state revealed in March that it had grown its full-year film production expenditure to $703 million in 2025, up from $560 million in pre-pandemic 2019, a figure that the office of Gov. JB Pritzker called an “all-time high.”
New Mexico and Georgia, both of which had been seen as up-and-coming as locations for major features and television series in recent years, saw notable declines in filming count and production spend to start 2026. One major soundstage operator noted of late that there’s been a trend in features moving back to traditional hubs in the past year.
“L.A. and New York have seen a rise in production with the downfall of other markets like Albuquerque, New Mexico, New Orleans, Louisiana, Atlanta, Georgia and a little bit of Chicago and Illinois,” said Hudson Pacific CEO Victor Coleman, the owner of Netflix-occupied Sunset Studios, at a Citi conference in Miami on March 2. The exec added, “Those markets are much more depressed. The tax credits in both Los Angeles and New York have enhanced what we see is the production flow.”
Overall, the U.S. saw a 10 percent decrease in filming count in the first quarter of this year, per ProdPro, even as production spend increased by 1 percent. The declines came mostly on the feature side (down 21 percent) while TV episode activity increased 4 percent.
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