To tell how Sylvester Stallone managed to make Rocky, Peter Farrelly needed places that resembled the Philadelphia of the 1970s. Turning in the city of the original film, however, did not fall into the production accounts. The director then considered Atlanta and Sydney, where incentives would save, before finding a closer solution: New Jersey. For I Play Rocky a boxing arena was built in a Jersey City studio, while a Kenilworth warehouse housed the reconstructions of the Rocky gym and apartment. A beach in Asbury Park has even become a beach in Los Angeles. According to Variety, the film spent $27 million in the state, getting 10 in incentives.
The case explains why New Jersey is becoming an increasingly popular destination for film production. In 2024, state sector expenditure reached $833 million: only Happy Gilmore 2, with Adam Sandler, spent 152 in 64 days of filming. In the same year A Complete Unknown, the film about Bob Dylan with Timothée Chalamet, and Deliver Me from Nowhere, dedicated to Bruce Springsteen, were filmed here. For 2025 Variety reported an estimated expenditure of more than a billion dollars and 73 projects that used the incentive program, compared to the 46 of the previous year. These last issues concern the production of benefits: the total work done in the State, including the smaller ones, is much wider.
Growth is mainly linked to the excellent political insights of recent years. In 2018, the then-democratic governor Phil Murphy restored the tax credit for cinema and digital content, suspended in 2010 by Republican predecessor Chris Christie. The programme was expanded and extended until 2049. The mechanism allows productions to recover part of the expenses allowed through a tax credit, which can be ceded to other subjects. New Jersey rules provide ordinary rates of 30 or 35 percent, depending on the item of expenditure and the place where it is supported, with more favourable conditions for certain categories of production. For those who prepare the budget of a film, the difference can be worth millions of dollars and determine where it will turn.
New Jersey also offers advantages that an incentive alone cannot create. It is close to New York, where actors, directors and technicians work, and many local professionals already live in the state. Productions can then draw on experienced personnel without transferring a whole crew from afar. In a relatively small area there are also industrial districts, urban centres, countryside and seaside resorts. In Variety, the professionals in charge of looking for the settings also described a very concrete assistance of the state film commission: identifying suitable places, solving problems with permits and reporting the municipalities already affected by the presence of other sets. For Disclosure Day by Steven Spielberg, for example, the commission helped to find about 24 kilometers of tracks for a tracking sequence.
The duration of the facilities is above all to convince enterprises to build permanent structures. Netflix provides an investment of a billion dollars in the former military base of Fort Monmouth, where the project includes 12 posing theatres and other production spaces. In Bayonne, the 1888 Studios complex, developed by Togus Urban Renewal, provides 23: Paramount has signed a rental contract of at least ten years for a part of the spaces. Lionsgate will be the main tenant of a new studio in Newark. The prospect of taking advantage of incentives for over twenty years allows companies to plan investments that require much more time than shooting a single film.
It remains to be understood how much this growth contributes to public finances. Productions pay hotels, catering, transport, materials and suppliers, as well as people employed on the set. The expenditure generated, however, does not coincide with the money that returns to the state in the form of taxes, and the number of bonds does not automatically measure how many stable jobs have been created. In order to assess the programme, we must also consider how many productions would come anyway and how much they cost the necessary facilities to attract others. New Jersey focuses on new studies to give continuity to work between a film and the next one, but there is still to understand how many of those spaces will be occupied and how many local enterprises will be able to work regularly.
L’articolo New Jersey is the new Hollywood proviene da IlNewyorkese.
