Hollywood’s Covid-19 protocols, which added hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost of making movies and TV shows over the course of the pandemic, officially end today, concurrent with the date the federal government has identified as the expiration of the Coronavirus public health emergency.
The final dollar cost of the protocols may never be known, but the latest annual reports from the California Film Commision offer a glimpse of the magnitude.
In California alone, the 92 feature films and seven TV series that received the state’s tax incentives over the past two fiscal years are estimated to have racked up a whopping $223.5 million in Covid-related costs, which in turn were covered by the state’s tax credit program.
The California Film Commission’s 2021 annual report called the raw numbers “startling.” And that’s just in California, and only for projects that received the state’s tax credits, which also cover Covid-related costs.
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