Is New Jersey Becoming The New Hollywood? Netflix, Tax Credits Fuel The ‘Jerseywood’ Boom

Devon Williams (NJ State House News Service)

Across the state, New Jersey is speculating that film will become the next big industry.

Netflix’s planned major studio at Fort Monmouth is part of a broader effort to turn New Jersey into a permanent production hub. In Newark, construction began in December 2025 on a Great Point Studios complex through Lionsgate, while in Bayonne, 1888 Studios broke ground the same month and signed Paramount to a minimum 10-year lease.

This re-entry into the world of film builds on the state’s history. Thomas Edison’s Black Maria studio in West Orange helped launch early motion pictures in the 1890s, while Fort Lee later became one of the country’s first film capitals before the industry shifted to Hollywood’s golden hills.

State officials and industry boosters now frame the current boom as film “coming home” to New Jersey.

“It’s exploding,” said Janice Kovach, a member of the New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission and mayor of Clinton. “I believe it’s a permanent shift.”

Kovach said New Jersey’s advantage is that it expanded its film incentives gradually while also building the local government and business infrastructure needed to support productions. “That infrastructure that’s going to create permanent jobs and a tax base for communities is really what’s significant,” she said.

Now, as high-profile projects shoot in North Jersey and the Shore, including the Adam Sandler film “Happy Gilmore 2” and the Bruce Springsteen biopic “Deliver Me from Nowhere,” many of the studios that fled west are on their way back, lured by a $430 million annual incentive program.

Large studios are again taking root though properties like Netflix’s planned Fort Monmouth campus, which includes Eatontown and Oceanport, Lionsgate’s Newark Complex, and Paramount’s lease at 1888 Studios in Bayonne.

Eatontown officials have heard concerns about traffic and infrastructure, but believes the Netflix project’s benefits outweigh those costs, said Mayor Anthony Talerico.

“We are seeing businesses advertising to and courting the film industry. Netflix itself has already begun to use local vendors for its events,” Talerico said. “While we understand that traffic is a concern, much of Netflix traffic will be off-hours.”

Netflix is financing electric and sewer upgrades, and the borough has developed “an excellent relationship,” Talerico said, with the global streaming service as it works through zoning, construction, emergency services and other local needs.

Additionally, the borough and Netflix entered into an agreement where Eatontown received a $5 million payment, according to Talerico, that helps replace economic setbacks associated with the 2011 U.S. Army base closure.

“The closure of the Fort had a ripple effect on the community with job loss and loss of revenue for the ancillary businesses that supported the Fort in the area,” Talerico said. “A company as large as Netflix will be a wonderful boost to not only replace what was lost but provide new growth.”

To attract productions, New Jersey offers transferable film and digital media tax credits of up to 35% for many qualified production expenses, with higher 40% credits available for certain long-term studio partners and film-lease production companies.

A Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists spokesperson said the incentives have helped New Jersey claim a larger share of domestic production work at a time when overall entertainment employment remains below its streaming-era peak.

Local tax incentives are allowing the state to grow rapidly in the film industry, a SAG-AFTRA spokesperson said. These incentives keep work from moving abroad and center production in the Northeast.

But New Jersey Policy Perspective Senior Analyst Peter Chen warned that incentives cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

Many see this cost as an enormous drain on the state’s resources when local and state-level economies will likely never see the full amount returned as direct revenue. The credits become essentially a large grant as companies sell their credits on the secondary market for money they can use on construction or production projects.

“Functionally, it’s the same thing, whether they say it’s a tax credit or whether they’re saying it’s a direct subsidy,” said Chen.

Because the credits are transferable, production companies can sell them to other taxpayers. A 2024 report from the Office of the State Auditor found that 30 out of 41 total certified projects sold $80.9 million in credits at an average of 93 cents on the dollar, with nearly half purchased by a single major corporation, that remained unnamed in the audit.

The audit found that the New Jersey Economic Development Authority had adequate controls to administer the program, but warned that legislation may be needed to increase its economic benefit. It also found that state law does not require the development authority to perform a cost-benefit analysis, and said current and future tax credit allocations could reach nearly $9.5 billion through fiscal year 2039.

“These kinds of programs, which are spending programs – they’re framed as tax credits, but this is a spending program where the state is writing a check to the film industry,” explained Chen.

The auditors also found that 60% of production expenses, or about $15 million, were purchased from out-of-state vendors.

Kovach said the state and Film Commission have been looking at which goods and services are still being purchased from out of state and are trying to build those sectors in-state to keep those purchases within local economies.

“What don’t we have in New Jersey?” Kovach said. “For a while, lumber was a big issue, and they were going to Long Island to the lumber yards. Well, now we have lumber in the state of New Jersey. Same thing with cameras. They don’t need to go across the river now to get a camera.”

To those within the industry that up-front state cost is worthwhile as filming brings in significant revenue through other means.

“Any time there’s a shoot, the coffee shops profit, the lumber yards profit, the dry cleaners profit, the grocery store – everybody wins,” said Diane Raver, executive director of the New Jersey Film Academy at Brookdale Community College.

Kovach said one production in Cranford spent $20,000 on balloons for a parade scene, while another production brought weeks of business to hotels and motels in Atlantic and Cape May counties during the offseason.

But Chen says these added benefits are limited: “Those spillover effects are pretty minimal. …Why are we subsidizing this entire industry alongside it?”

SAG-AFTRA argued that New Jersey’s studio buildout is already moving the state beyond one-off shoots as high-profile companies commit to large and expensive campuses. New Jersey is already equipped with a strong, unionized film workforce that will keep up with this extensive growth.

Lawmakers have also proposed a New Jersey Film Trail to promote sites where popular movies and television shows were filmed, though critics like Chen question whether tourism benefits can justify the scale of the state’s film subsidies.

Diane Raver, Director of the New Jersey Film Academy, said the academy is trying to expand the entry-level workforce needed to make the boom last.

“What we’re doing differently than, say, a four-year institution, is to build out the bottom entry-level positions with solid knowledge of all the departments,” Raver said. “There’s production accounting, production office and management, locations, costuming, hair and makeup, all those things.”

“This is a workforce,” she said. Being able to create state-focused manpower to support this film boom is “where other states failed,” she continued.

SAG-AFTRA said increased New Jersey production is already creating work for thousands of New Jersey residents last year.

Kovach said the Film Commission created a program to help towns understand what productions need before crews arrive.

“The Film Commission has done an amazing job creating a Film Ready program – which is like a ‘what to expect when you’re expecting,’” Kovach said.

She said the program gives towns a more standard process for asking productions whether they need police, street closures, parking, public works support or other local services.

“There is no cost,” Kovach said of local services for productions. “Any production that is in a town, they will cover whatever costs for police… for use of equipment, for use of water, whatever it may be.”

The deepest long-term concern for skeptics is whether studios will stay if another state offers stronger incentives.

“This particular industry is highly mobile,” said Chen. “They can just leave. They can just pack up and go to the next place that offers more subsidies.”

Kovach said incentives may be the “initial hook,” but argued that productions return when a state is easy to work in. She said New Jersey’s Film Commission offers a kind of “concierge service,” helping productions identify locations, work with state agencies and navigate local governments.

“If it’s identifying locations, if it is working with a state agency, if it’s working with local government, the commission really does offer that handheld service,” Kovach said.

She said permanent studio infrastructure makes it more likely productions will keep working in New Jersey, especially when combined with the state’s range of locations.

Many are optimistic that New Jersey is taking the right steps to bring film home to the state to stay, yet the permanence and financial viability of this industry shift has yet to be seen.

“We’re Jersey proud, but we’re also proud of our communities, and we want to see it on the big screen,” Kovach said.