With Trump’s backing, a federal film incentive gains ground in Georgia

Hopeful is the best way to describe the mood at Assembly Studios on Tuesday night, where film industry stakeholders gathered to discuss the introduction of a federal film production incentive.

The timing of the event was fortuitous. About 24 hours earlier, President Donald Trump expressed his support for the incentive on his social media platform, Truth Social. Congress should immediately approve a federal incentive to create entertainment jobs, he wrote. It should be a bipartisan effort.

The Atlanta event was organized by the Coalition for American Production, one of the organizations that has championed the creation of the incentive for more than a year. Now, with an endorsement from the president, their measure has teeth.

The exact details of the federal incentive — whether it’s a rebate or a transferable tax credit, if it will be capped, the final percentage of the qualified spend the production will get back — haven’t been finalized. The legislation hasn’t been drafted, and a lawmaker has yet to step forward to sponsor it. But the general consensus is that it will be stackable, serving to enhance regional incentives that turned states like Georgia into production powerhouses.

During his remarks at the event, Brian Papworth, the executive director of CAP, offered an analogy that was used during a meeting with the Motion Picture Association.

“This is like a stew,” Papworth said. “You like the meat, and you like the okra, and you like the carrots, but you don’t like the lima beans. But you pick around it. The first version of this incentive is not going to have everything we want, but it’s going to be a start.”

The president’s support of the incentive comes as the United States grapples with a downturn in film and television production that has left crew members, talent and vendors out of work. Many soundstages are empty. Prop houses and equipment rental companies have closed up shop.

Over the past several years, producers have increasingly moved projects overseas, looking to take advantage of generous international incentive programs, favorable exchange rates and cheaper labor. Georgia, which has offered a 30% transferable tax credit for more than a decade, is not solely competing with California and New York to land major projects. All three are competing with Hungary, Ireland, the Czech Republic and Australia.

There’s an important nuance in discussions about productions moving overseas. Fewer productions are being made altogether. The streaming boom — that is, companies green-lighting films and television series to build out their libraries and attract subscribers — inflated normal levels of production. Businesses rushed to meet demand: for stage space, for equipment, for props, for qualified talent.

Georgia led the way in job growth for the motion picture and video industries between 2011 and 2021, adding more than 15,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But Wall Street eventually came knocking. Streamers and studios needed to turn their attention toward profitability. Now, there is less business to go around in an industry that expanded to meet its needs.

There’s been an unshakeable sense of malaise among industry professionals in Georgia for the past two years. Many have moved out of state to find work elsewhere or pivoted industries entirely. Some are taking work they otherwise would not have to pay the bills, such as commercials or micro-dramas.

The film industry’s challenges were brought to Trump’s attention more than a year beforehand. In May 2025, he announced on Truth Social that he was directing his administration to impose a 100% tariff on movies produced in foreign countries.

This measure was largely rebuffed by experts and industry professionals, as entertainment products like movies are considered services. They redirected his attention toward a federal incentive, one that industry stakeholders have long said must be carried forward by Republican lawmakers to make it out of Congress.

The U.S. government has never offered a nationwide tax incentive, unlike countries such as Canada, Australia and Spain. Incentive programs have been dictated by the states.

Georgia’s current incentive, which expanded under then-Gov. Sonny Perdue, has largely received bipartisan support. The upsides of the incentive were not hard sells: The industry is a job creator, with the largest of projects employing thousands of skilled craftspeople, vendors and other small businesses. They’re blue-collar jobs that pay white-collar wages. It could attract economic activity and investment to the state.

And it did. Some argue the film industry was one of the sectors that helped Georgia recover from the pandemic, as it was one of the first states to open back up for business. In an opinion piece penned for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2024, former Gov. Nathan Deal said the film industry injected fast cash into Georgia’s economy in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

But opponents have long argued there is a low return on investment. The funds could be used for other budget priorities, from education to infrastructure. The jobs that are created are temporary and could be easily moved if the credits were to ever go away. Or, in the case of what’s happened recently, other locations start giving away more.