Los Angeles may finally be seeing the first tangible effects of California’s expanded film and television tax credit, with new data showing production activity ticking up at the start of 2026 after a punishing stretch for the region’s entertainment economy.
According to FilmLA’s latest quarterly report, shoot days in Greater Los Angeles rose roughly 10 percent in the first quarter compared with the October-to-December period, a modest but notable improvement after filming in the region fell to new lows last year. Features were the brightest spot, posting a 52 percent year-over-year jump and offering the clearest indication yet that the state’s revised incentive program may be starting to push projects back toward California.
But if the numbers offer a reason for cautious optimism, they also underscore just how far the industry still has to climb.
FilmLA recorded 5,121 shoot days in the first quarter, a figure that remains nearly 30 percent below the five-year average. At the current pace, Los Angeles would still be on track for one of its weakest production years outside of 2025, reinforcing the extent of the slowdown that has gripped the region as the aftershocks of the 2023 strikes, studio cost-cutting and the broader retrenchment in streaming continue to reshape the business.
In recent years, California lawmakers moved to strengthen the state’s film and TV tax credit program in an effort to stem runaway production and keep more below-the-line jobs anchored locally. Those changes are now beginning to register on the ground. The first titles selected under the expanded program have entered production, accounting for nearly 7 percent of all shoot days in Los Angeles during the quarter. State-incentivized projects represented 22 percent of all feature filming and 17 percent of TV production.
In a statement, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said, “Hollywood is finally turning a corner with more productions and more jobs.”
Whether that corner turns into a broader recovery remains an open question.
The economics of filming in California — and especially Los Angeles — remain difficult. Competing jurisdictions continue to offer richer subsidies, in many cases including above-the-line compensation, while also benefiting from lower labor costs. Those structural disadvantages have helped push productions, particularly features, to markets like the U.K., where labor can be cheaper and studios are not responsible for health insurance in the same way they are in the U.S.
Still, features were the quarter’s standout category. FilmLA logged 687 feature shoot days, more than 20 percent above the five-year average. Roughly 22 percent of that activity came from state-backed productions including Behemoth! from Searchlight Pictures, One Attempt Remaining from Netflix and Nightwatching from Amazon MGM Studios.
Television, long the backbone of Los Angeles production, painted a much less encouraging picture.
TV shoot days fell 28 percent quarter over quarter, and at 1,196 days, the category came in more than 60 percent below the five-year average. Reality television was particularly weak, dropping 52 percent from the prior quarter. The falloff mirrors a larger contraction in the unscripted business, which research firm Luminate says has seen U.S. premieres decline by roughly one-third since 2022.
That imbalance — stronger feature activity paired with continued softness in television — may become one of the defining themes of the region’s recovery. For years, TV has provided the kind of recurring, dependable work that sustained crews, vendors and support businesses across the Los Angeles production ecosystem. Without a meaningful rebound there, any recovery in features may prove helpful but incomplete.
“While it’s still too early to make predictions for the coming months, the increase in Shoot Days we are seeing in key categories gives hope for a broader rise in production activity and points to the California Film and Television Tax Program’s growing impact on local job creation,” said FilmLA CEO Denise Gutches.
For now, Los Angeles appears to be doing what it has spent the past year struggling to do at all: show some forward motion. But the latest quarter also makes clear that this is not yet a comeback story so much as an early test of whether California’s policy response can meaningfully alter the economics of where film and television
jason@stagerunner.net
