n a Sunday morning in January, traffic in central Sydney ground to a halt. Filming for Universal’s latest blockbuster, The Fall Guy,While never disclosed, the studio paid a rumoured A$1m to the New South Wales government for that day’s shoot. Butto 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.
It’s what Hollywood calls “soft money”. More than 40 jurisdictions around the world have some version of it and Australia is among the most generous. In 2021-22 a milestone was reached: As the chief executive of Screen Producers Australia, Matthew Deaner, puts it: “Just what are the cultural benefits to the nation?”The doubling of the tax rebate coincides with the premature termination of the location incentive scheme, which is expected to exhaust its $540m budget later this year, four years earlier than expected.
Much like the concluding location incentive scheme, the tax rebate overwhelmingly favours films from overseas. It is specifically tailored to attract “footloose” productions: films and shows that could be shot anywhere in the world. It’s not a sustainable industry if governments have to keep chucking buckets of cash at the foreign players.
“There’s no logic to this,” says Jo Caust, a cultural policy academic at the University of Melbourne. Deaner says that while he has no doubt Hollywood blockbusters feed back into the economy through local spending and job creation, he questions what they contribute to Australia’s cultural life. Or Bali, as was the case in Ticket to Paradise, which was shot in Queensland with $6.4m of Australian government money. Or, in the case of Thor and Planet of the Apes, another timeline or reality altogether.Photograph: FlixPix/AlamyWhile the explosive growth in foreign productions in Australaia can be partly attributed to low Covid rates and a favourable exchange rate, experts believe the most compelling lure has been the incentives.
“When we were doing [the groundwork], they’d [the government] hired a consultant and they basically just tweaked the multiplier to make it look good,” the former government employee said.
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Source: 9NewsSyd - 🏆 23. / 51 Read more »