SENATOR Robinhood C. Padilla advocated temporarily providing tax exemptions for films produced locally; thus throwing full support for a proposal pitched by Sen. Jinggoy Estrada in a privileged speech on Tuesday.
This developed as several senators backed the enabling bill bolstering the film industry, following Sen. Estrada’s speech. The senator affirmed that records of the Senate committee hearing “will bear me out that I was trying to take a grasp of the state that the audiovisual services sector has been in nowadays, which by and large, is on the verge of collapse even during the pre-pandemic period and which was painted in that hearing to be now in the ICU [intensive care unit] needing critical care from specialists.”
Lamenting that “this is the abysmal state of our local film industry,” the senator reminded that for this year, only nine local movies have been released, according to theater group operators, noting that the nine were from the 20 films reviewed by the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board or MTRCB since January this year.na pelikula kada taon
To further illustrate, Estrada explains that for a P50-million film production with a P100 million box office revenue, the producer needs to pay amusement tax, value-added tax and distribution fee. “On top of this, there is VAT [value-added tax] to be paid by the producer; and from the 45 million peso ticket sales, the amount will dwindle to P39.6 million,” he said.ESTRADA explained that from these figures, a 5-percent distribution fee will still be deducted, which leaves the producer with the final amount of P37.62 million.And if a producer makes a profit, he still has to pay a 30-percent income tax, Estrada said.