Could Utah lure away productions from Hollywood?

Filming of "Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1," produced by Warner Bros. (2024). The film was partially supported by the Utah Motion Picture Incentive Program.

Gone are the days when all films were shot, directed, edited and produced in Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is trying hard not to let L.A. lose its status as a globally known entertainment hub.

“It’s on life support,” he told reporters in May. “We need to step things up, and this is all part and parcel of economic recovery, economic growth.”

Many factors contributed to the trend of Hollywood’s slow demise, from the writers’ and actors’ strikes in 2023 to the streaming industry’s hostile takeover of the world of entertainment. L.A. is also more expensive compared to other film hubs like Georgia and New Jersey that also offer tax credits alongside cheaper labor.

Three weeks ago, Newsom more than doubled the film and TV tax credit program in California from $330 million to $750 million a year. He also awarded a total of $1.1 billion to 16 new shows at a time when the state is struggling with a $12 billion budget deficit.

It will be a while before this increased funding bears any fruit. In the meantime, other states across the U.S. are attempting to lure away more projects by offering the film industry similar tax incentives.

In late June, Gov. Greg Abbott allowed for the passage of a bill that increased the state’s film tax credit from $200 million every two years to $300 million.

As The Ankler notes, Texas isn’t “in the same league as” other production hubs, like California or New York.

But it will “occupy a second tier of states, including Louisiana and Pennsylvania, where subsidies are significant enough to consistently attract production.”

So, where does Utah fit in?

What’s Utah’s film tax credit like?

The Beehive State’s tax credit isn’t as sizable as that of California or even Texas. But the state has benefited from it, according to the Utah Film Commission, managed by the governor’s office.

“There is some competitiveness there,” Utah Film Commission director Virginia Pearce said, but Utah has an edge because it receives many specific outdoor location requests.

But Utah does, at times, lose projects to other regional locales, like California, New Mexico, Montana and Canada.

What Utah fails to offer in terms of big incentives, it makes up for through a “film-friendly” attitude, said Pearce. Plus, the cost of filming in Salt Lake City is much lower than say, Manhattan — another bonus.

In December last year, the Utah Film Commission celebrated 100 years since the first film was shot in the state. The 1924 silent Western, “The Deadwood Coach,” was produced in Cedar City. In addition to the centennial accomplishment, the commission also celebrated its 50th anniversary.

The tax incentives came much later. The latest iteration, the Motion Picture Incentive Program, was created by the Utah Legislature in 2011, with incentives capped initially at $6.79 million. This sparked growth in the local film industry for a few years.

As the Deseret News has previously reported, about 75% of the first three seasons of “Yellowstone” were filmed in Utah, including locations in Heber City, Oakley, Kamas, Grantsville and Logan. As one of the latest production to come to the state, “Yellowstone” spent roughly $80 million over three years.

But Utah could not keep up with the incentives other states offered.

The fourth season of “Yellowstone,” which aired in November 2021, was filmed almost entirely in Montana, where Paramount tapped into a $12 million incentive. This left a void in Utah.

In 2022, Kevin Costner, the star of “Yellowstone,” was scouting locations for another project, “Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1.” The production set the groundwork for a western epic universe.

Costner eyed Utah at the time, but publicly advocated for the passage of a bill — SB49 — before he made any commitments.

The bill introduced an incentive of $12 million for any production that filmed 75% of its project in the rural parts of Utah. It also raised the annual cap by close to $2 million to $8.3 million.

“‘Yellowstone’ had already gone to Montana at that point,” said Virginia Pearce. So, it wasn’t just about one show anymore.

“This was really a reaction to rural counties seeing the economic benefits that could come with them, and hotels they use, and the restaurants ... you know, just the overall spend.”

She estimated that an average production company spends between $100,000 to $150,000 a day.

A 2021 study for the Motion Picture Association of Utah, conducted by Olsberg SPI, found that for each $1 spent on the tax incentive, Utah’s economy makes $7 back through production spending. “Film-influenced tourism” also generated over $6 billion for the state in the last decade.

As for the rural incentive program, Pearce said roughly 28 projects were approved, and those projects brought more than $200 million in spending to the state.

What do filmmakers come looking for in Utah?

Utah has attracted several other notable projects. Film studios often come looking for unique landscapes, which the Beehive State has ample in supply, whether it’s the Red Rock or the salt flats.

A few projects come because of the state’s powder snow, like HBO’s “Mountainhead,” an Emmy-nominated satire about tech billionaire friends, which was primarily filmed at a $65 million home in Park City.

“They needed a really opulent, beautiful home slope side,” Pearce recalled about the “Succession” inspired screenplay.

Other popular requests her office gets are from productions that don’t want the set to be too specific.

“A lot of films are looking for kind of an ‘any town in the U.S.A’ look. Disney loved that about Utah. They could shoot in Tooele, Midvale, and Liberty Park, and it kind of can look like any city,” the Utah Film Commission director explained.

Two major Disney productions, “High School Musical,” the original trilogy and the Disney+ series, and “Andi Mack,” have been shot around the Salt Lake Valley.

That’s why the cast and crew of Hulu’s “A Murder at the End of the World,” which follows a Gen Z amateur detective and several guests solving a murder at a retreat in Iceland, ended up in the Beehive State.

Brit Marling, creator of the show, said she’d driven by Green River, Utah, during the process of writing her show and found the place to be “eerie.”

“The desert scape is vast and seems to match a snowscape,” she says in a behind-the-scenes video posted by FX.

“When you’re watching ‘A Murder at the End of the World,’ you’re bouncing back and forth between the most disparate worlds like luxury and wealth and extreme and snow and Iceland,” says Marling, “and then two punk kids on a kind of Badlands romance in the American West, and yet somehow they feel like they belong together.”

A locally known restaurant, Ray’s Tavern, and the Whispering Sands Motel made appearances in the miniseries.

Amazon’s “Fallout” was also in search for a location that could appear quiet or unsettling on screen. This show centers around a world reeling from an apocalyptic nuclear fallout in Los Angeles in the year 2077.

It’s worth noting that Hollywood swooped in, offering producers a $25 million tax credit for the second season of this show, displaying the competitive nature of film incentives.

With Sundance leaving, is there a crack in the ecosystem?

The creators of Marvel’s “Thunderbolts*” were in search of distinctive desert textures.

The film’s director, Jake Schreier, told Time Out that “Thunderbolts*” was filmed in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia but they also did a two-week stint in Utah — Emery and Grand counties, to be specific.

The production crew set up on a mile-long stretch of road in 100-degree temperatures for a chase scene between the movie’s CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and the Thunderbolts superheroes.

That wasn’t Schreier’s first time in Utah. According to a New York Daily News report from January 2012, he visited when his dramatic comedy, “Robot and Frank,” was screened in Park City at the Sundance Film Festival.

This film festival creates a perfect little ecosystem for the Utah Film Commission to tap into as Hollywood VIPs and nobodies flock to the ski town once a year.

Sundance DNSTOCK_tc_0011.JPG

“One great example is Taylor Sheridan,” Pearce said.

Now known for the “Yellowstone” franchise, Sheridan “had been to the festival with other projects, fell in love with Park City and neighboring counties and ended up shooting his feature ‘Wind River’ here.”

His neo-western crime film premiered at Sundance in 2017. “Then he brought ‘Yellowstone,” Pearce noted.

But while Utah bolstered its efforts to attract more TV and movie productions in recent years, it lost the Sundance Film Festival to Boulder, Colorado, which offered a $34 million tax credit.

Park City will have its last go at this film festival that generated $132 million in state GDP last year, as KSL.com reported. It’s a huge loss for Utah but the Beehive State’s Film Commission is optimistic.

“Obviously, Sundance Film Festival is still going to exist, and it’s just a state away, so we can always travel to see those people,” Pearce said.

“If anything, it’s opened the state’s eyes in terms of just the creative economy that Sundance helped build here. How can we grow the economy as a whole instead of just one organization?”

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Think tank sues Arizona government over film tax credits

The Utah Film Commission is convinced these tax credits work but in Arizona, a different tale is brewing.

Earlier this year, the Goldwater Institute asked a judge to overturn Arizona’s $125 million a year in state tax incentives for filmmakers.

Jon Riches, the vice president for litigation and general counsel at Goldwater Institute, told the Deseret News the tax credits violate the state’s gift clause. This provision asks the government to show it received a fair return on investment for creating the subsidy, he explained. Courts don’t count “anticipated jobs or tax revenues” as a return on investment.

Productions “get a tax credit, and all of the company has to do in return is say the film was produced or shot in Arizona in the end movie credits,” said Riches.

For example, the litigator said, if a film’s tax liability is $500,000 but they claim $1 million in tax credit, Arizona’s taxpayers write them a check for the difference whether the film releases or not.

Riches noted that the refundable nature of film tax subsidies in Arizona is problematic. But modifying the law isn’t enough, he said.

“Public resources should be put to use to benefit the public, not enrich private, special interests — whether it’s subsidies to films or subsidies to private developers to build high-rise buildings, because it’s all the same," Riches said.

He said he doesn’t believe the government should pick winners or losers, and that the market should make these decisions.

Riches worked with Michael Thom, an Associate Professor at the USC Price School of Public Policy, who studies the financial implications of state incentives to attract the film industry.

Thom testified before the California Senate Revenue and Taxation Committee on March 26, 2025, where he referenced one of his four studies on the subject, including “Lights, Camera, but No Action? Tax and Economic Development Lessons From State Motion Picture Incentive Programs,” published in 2018.

“I found that ... twenty-three states produced an independent evaluation of their incentives, and every single one concluded that it was strongly revenue negative,” he said in his testimony, as reported by USC.

Thom said his other studies concluded that tax incentives didn’t raise the GDP in California or other high-spending states, nor did they significantly impact wages and employment.

Adrien Noriega

But states like Utah and California seem to believe differently, as Newsom works to get Hollywood off “life support” through an expanded incentive program.

Is Utah is in a more favorable position? The Beehive State’s 100-year legacy in film comes with skilled crews, studio space, equipment vendors and anything else necessary to make a decent film, Pearce said.

She added that Utah operates a “small, sustainable program, compared to other states,” and that feels like the right kind of investment for now.