There are currently no productions being filmed at EUE/Screen Gems Studio in Wilmington, a major slow-down according to Johnny Griffin, director of the Wilmington Regional Film Commission.
“A month ago here we had two productions that were shooting and there were five to six hundred people working,” Griffin said.
Those two productions were TNT’s series Good Behavior and the History Channel’s series Six. Griffin said there has been some interest from other companies, but there is something keeping them from committing.
“I think a part of it could be our incentives,” Griffin said. “They are the biggest driving factor behind the business. Right now, it’s a two-year incentive program and we are in year two of that cycle. For television production hoping to do a series, you may want to look two, three, four years into the future for that series so you know that, if it’s a success, you can stay there for multiple years.”
Griffin said in that scenario, with the state’s incentives expiring in June 2017, companies would only know they had incentives for their first season, not the second or third.
“If they’ve got to pick up the phone every time and call us and ask ‘Do you have an incentive?’, ‘What’s the legislation process?’, ‘When does it expire?’, often times that’s just more trouble than it’s worth,” Griffin added.
That leaves production companies turning their backs on North Carolina and fleeing for states like Georgia.
Read more at Fox Wilmington
