At AFM, Global Incentive Issues Take the Spotlight
variety.comAngus Finney Industry players treading the floors of Le Meridien Delfina, the American Film Market’s new venue, will be besieged by aggressive funding offers and fliers tubthumping diverse landscapes and state-of-the-art facilities from all around the world — marketing tools promoting incentives and driving the heated battle for productions across the globe.
The incentive wars have been raging for decades, with several U.S. states and leading producing nations — such as Canada, the U.K., France, Spain, Australia, New Zealand and Germany — battling over a $177 billion worldwide production pot being spent on film, scripted TV and docs in 2019 alone, according to consultants OlsbergSPI.
Given the inherent link between total production spend and automatic funding systems as a crude percentage, that indicates that some $20 billion-$30 billion of tax credits, production rebates and other automatic mechanisms are underpinning worldwide production.
But just as the industry at large is reeling from strike actions, the impact of streamers and talk of a “great spend re-correction,” all is not well in the land of automatic funding incentives.
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