NYC Film and TV Production Is Booming. Here’s Why

After a long rough spell, New York City is approaching pre-COVID production levels as other production hubs struggle. California, take notes.

It’s true: New York City film and TV production is in the midst of a significant comeback.

“We’re especially seeing [an uptick in production] in the past 30 days,” said NYC Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) Commissioner Rafael Espinal. “Our permitting numbers in the past month are hitting the same metrics that we were seeing five or six years ago, prior to the pandemic.”

The total number of shooting permits the city issued rose each month in 2026: 297 in February, 496 in March, 551 in April, 627 in May. The number of projects receiving permits went from 77 in February to 220 in May.

Quantifying production volume in NYC is not an exact science. Unlike other cities, the Mayor’s Office doesn’t track soundstage shooting. Permits are an imperfect metric: They don’t account for the number of shoot days or distinguish between a two-day commercial and a recurring TV series, a low-budget indie with a skeleton crew and a nine-figure blockbuster employing a small army.

But in talking to NYC crew, producers, and the city’s biggest vendors, there is consensus: This is the biggest production boom in years, the turnaround has been sharp, and there are signs it can sustain through 2026 and into 2027.

A Sharp Turnaround

Owners of Steiner, Silvercup, and Wildflower Studios — three of the biggest soundstage and production facilities in NYC — tell IndieWire that in 2026, they are back to full or near-full capacity, after a sustained rough patch.

While IATSE did not have any employment numbers to share, NYC-based line producers and unit production managers tell IndieWire that for the first time in years, crew is busy and in demand.

“This is the first time I’ve had trouble crewing up in a while,” said one line producer. “These last three years, when I was lucky enough to have a project, I pretty much had my pick of crew. That’s not the case now. I’m struggling to hire my people.”

Why the sudden and rapid turnaround in New York, even as other major production hubs like Georgia and Los Angeles are still suffering?

Sources offered a number of possible factors, but there was universal agreement on a driving force: Governor Kathy Hochul signed the NY State budget on May 28, 2025, which renewed and enhanced the New York Film and TV tax incentive program that went into effect last summer.

“We know that it was [the tax incentive], definitely.  It’s just demonstrable. There were productions that were on hold, literally telling us, ‘We want to be here, but we can’t commit until we have some certainty on the tax credit,’” said Wildflower Studio’s co-developer and investor Rapheal De Niro. “It doesn’t get any more clear-cut than that, and that’s multiple productions that said that to us.”

Hochul is seen as the most pro-production governor the film and TV world has had in Albany. “The governor really gets it,” said Doug Steiner, owner of Steiner Studios. “Her tweaks to the credit in the last budget have made a huge difference, and New York is extremely competitive for film and TV production again.”

Beyond the funds committed to the program, the ways in which new incentives allocate those dollars are applauded for luring productions to return.

Certainty, Not Just Subsidies

The new incentives created certainty. Governor Hochul successfully pushed to raise the annual cap on New York’s film and television tax incentive from $420 million to $800 million and extend the program through 2036. That gave financiers and producers confidence that they could continue relying on a 30% rebate on qualified in-state spending — including up to $500,000 per project for above-the-line salaries of actors, writers, and directors.

Financiers and studios have always preferred the NY incentive because it was a rebate. That 30% is cash, not a tax credit, but recipients complained that it took too much time and effort to receive the money. Hochul’s new incentive also addressed that problem.

“I’ve heard even before [I became MOME commissioner], while I was a city council member, that there was so many hoops and hurdles that productions had [to jump] over to be able to receive their rebate, that on average it would take them three to five years  to receive that money,” said Espinal. “Now with the new amendments that were made, that has dramatically been cut down to up to a year. It’s a huge improvement that not enough financiers and production companies know about.”

The new incentives didn’t necessarily make New York cheaper, but it made it competitive enough to tip the scales for marquee talent disenchanted with shooting abroad.

Sources agree there are only a dozen or so actors and directors big enough to demand that a movie shoot in New York City, but that math changes with recurring TV series. Stars and top showrunners are unwilling to be away from home year after year, season after season. A good example of this is Netflix’s “The Diplomat,” which shot Season 1 in London, where the story is set, but moved to Brooklyn to accommodate its star, Keri Russell.

“It feels bizarre, because we have some of our same internal sets, but here in New York,” Russell told Rolling Stone of the switch from London to Brooklyn. “I can ride my bike to work. I am enormously grateful, because I still have kids at home, and so does Deborah Cahn, who writes the show, and it’s just immensely important to be close to home and not leave your kids to be raised by wolves.”

The Overseas Production Hangover

While the New York-based sources IndieWire interviewed have an obvious interest in bringing production back, they say conversations with studio executives and producers suggest growing buyer’s remorse over Hollywood’s shift abroad. The issue, they argue, goes beyond talent wanting to come home and reflects broader concerns about the industry’s reliance on overseas production.

“In the final analysis, sometimes offshore is not as inexpensive as it is sold to the majors,” said Steiner, relaying what he’s been hearing from producers they’ve worked closely with over the years. “The reality might not be as cheery as they expected, and there are some other limitations there that they hadn’t factored in.”

In Spring 2024, Hollywood headed into the IATSE negotiations anticipating another potential work stoppage. That never came to pass, but almost all production moved abroad and took advantage of government kickbacks in Europe and Canada. There was optimism in New York that, after the initial surge of overseas productions wrapped, production would return in 2025.

“I think last year surprised us a bit that it didn’t come back as strongly; we had lower occupancy than we projected,” said Kris Bagwell, executive VP and general manager of Silvercup Studios, which has 240,000 square feet of shooting space and 23 soundstages across three New York City locations in the Bronx and Long Island City.

In 2024-25, Steiner, for the first time since opening his 30 soundstages in the old Brooklyn Navy Yards, had to cut his prices to compete for the small number of NYC-based productions.

One way to capture the precipitous fall-off in NYC production and its recent rebirth is the story of Robert De Niro’s Wildflower Studios in Astoria. In 2019, the 760,000-square-foot studio space was conceived against a backdrop of sustained demand for NYC soundstages.

“It was the height of the streaming wars,” said managing partner Adam Gordon of Wildflower’s 2019-2021 pre-building phase. “And there was tremendous unfulfilled demand for production space.”

Wildflower’s pitch to investors and potential studio clients was that a purpose-built film and TV facility could attract the biggest projects. But when it opened in October 2024, demand had evaporated, leaving much of Wildflower empty for its first 15 months. By early 2026, Wildflower was near capacity.

“A couple months ago, I still would’ve been cautious and said to you, ‘I don’t know, it’s still kind of up and down,’ but that’s changed,” said Silvercup’s Bagwell. “The number of calls coming in, shows looking for space is significantly up over last year and the year before.”

Silvercup is projecting stronger occupancy in the fourth quarter of 2026 than it saw in the year’s first two quarters. Steiner says his stages are fully booked, and rates have normalized, even as new facilities such as Wildflower add inventory to the market and New Jersey ramps up efforts to attract productions across the Hudson.

Will NYC be the first U.S. production hub to fully return from pre-COVID and strike downturns? It’s too early to tell, but the lessons from its rebirth should be clear to California politicians.