New York is on the verge of overtaking California as the nation’s top state for television and film production, according to a new quarterly report from industry tracker ProdPro.
California still holds the top spot, with $1.76 billion in movie and TV production spend last quarter. But New York posted an 87 percent jump in production spend, reaching $1.61 billion, compared to California’s much slower 17 percent increase. The gap between the two states now stands at just $147 million.
“California’s production spending is starting to rise again, but New York’s rebound has accelerated this year, putting it within reach of the country’s largest production hub,” said Alex LoVerde, co-founder and CEO of ProdPro. “As we compiled the third-quarter figures, we thought New York might actually come out ahead. California held its lead by just $147 million. Whether New York can overtake it is a key question we’ll be watching in Q4 and 2027.”
New York’s gains come from years of investment in soundstage infrastructure, crew unions, and proximity to East Coast locations like the Tri-State area. The upcoming production Miami Vice: 85 filmed most of its principal photography in New York and in Wayne, New Jersey, rather than in Florida or California.
Real estate firm CBRE reported that New York’s soundstage inventory has grown 43 percent since 2020, driven by a wave of purpose-built facilities. CBRE said in June that New York is “better positioned for recovery than some competitor markets” after studios tightened spending across the board. The state has also landed scripted TV series that run for multiple seasons in the same soundstages — the kind of steady, long-term work that California has been losing.
Production Dollars Keep Leaving the Country
The competition between New York and California comes as a larger share of Hollywood’s money leaves the United States entirely. A new report from a coalition of entertainment unions, including IATSE, the Directors Guild of America, and SAG-AFTRA, found that studios now spend just 42 percent of film production budgets domestically, down from 74 percent twenty-five years ago.
Television has followed the same path. U.S.-based spending on TV production has dropped from 94 percent to 64 percent over the same period, the report found.
The study measured big-ticket productions: films budgeted at $5 million or more in 2025 dollars, and TV episodes costing at least $1 million for runtimes of 40 minutes or less, or $1.7 million for longer episodes. Overall studio spending has still grown in raw dollars — film production spending rose from $3 billion to $7 billion over the 25-year period, and TV spending jumped from $933 million to $8.4 billion — but a shrinking share of that money is staying on American soil.
For states like California that built entire local economies around entertainment jobs, that trend means fiercer competition not just from New York, but from production hubs overseas that offer studios a cheaper deal.
