How India Is Aiming To Lure Back Offshore Production With New 30% Cash Incentive

deadline.com:

India has always been a popular destination for international productions, hosting everything from European independent films and British series, most recently ITV’s Beecham House and Netflix/BBC’s A Suitable Boy, to studio movies like Christopher Nolan’s Tenet and Netflix’s Chris Hemsworth-starrer Extraction.In addition to the country’s oft-touted attractions – a skilled workforce, low costs, stunning landscapes and historical monuments – it also boasts a rich canon of English-language, India-set literature that the story-hungry streamers have been plundering in recent years.

Netflix’s A Suitable Boy and The White Tiger, Apple TV+’s Shantaram and HBO’s upcoming seven-part series A Fine Balance, are all based on India-themed novels.But the country has been pretty much off limits during the pandemic.

It had a disruptive although mostly manageable first wave of Covid in 2020, which nonetheless deterred some international shoots, before shocking the world with a devastating second wave and massive death toll that erupted in March/April 2021.That outbreak hit more than one production.

Shantaram, starring Charlie Hunnam as an Australian prison escapee hiding in a Mumbai slum, opted to move to Thailand in mid-2021, after shooting briefly in India in late 2020, due to the worsening Covid situation.