<
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/may/25/australia-is-spending-millions-to-lure-hollywood-productions-but-is-it-worth-it>
"On a Sunday morning in January, traffic in central Sydney ground to a halt.
Filming for Universal’s latest blockbuster,
The Fall Guy, closed the Harbour
Bridge and its surrounding city roads for seven hours.
While never disclosed, the studio paid a rumoured A$1m to the New South Wales
government for that day’s shoot. But that is a fraction of what Universal was
paid by Australian governments to bring the Ryan Gosling movie to Australia:
$30m in cash through the federal location incentive scheme, and a reputed
$14.4m thrown in by the NSW government, to ensure
The Fall Guy would shoot in
Sydney, not Brisbane or Melbourne.
That’s $44.4m in cash grants, before accounting for the 16.5% tax rebate
The
Fall Guy is entitled to claim for its total budget spend in Australia under
the location offset scheme. With a conservatively estimated budget of $150m,
the Hollywood action film could consume an estimated $60m of Australian revenue
in 2023.
But that is just a drop in the ocean. Over the past 15 years, successive
federal governments have ploughed almost $4bn into the international screen
industry in the form of tax rebates and cash subsidies designed to lure
big-budget movies to shoot in Australia.
And after sustained lobbying by California, that 16.5% location offset rebate
was almost doubled to 30% in the federal budget earlier this month."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
