New Jersey officials are once again traveling to Hollywood to convince movie and TV producers to shoot their projects in the Garden State — including the city of Newark, where a large new studio is being built as part of its economic revival.
Tim Sullivan, CEO of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, announced his latest jaunt to the West Coast during the Newark Summit, an inaugural commercial real estate conference that drew more than 900 attendees on Monday in New Jersey’s largest city. It’s the second such trip this year by a delegation.
“I’m heading out to California tomorrow and Wednesday to make the case for New Jersey out West” just as the Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild-AFTRA strikes are being resolved, Sullivan told the crowd.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy has made an expansion of the state’s “innovation economy,” attracting businesses in the entertainment, tech and science sectors, as the cornerstone of his administration’s economic development policy. During his tenure he and the state Legislature reinstated and made much more generous, tax incentives for filmmakers and TV producers. Several major studios are now planned for the state, projects Sullivan referenced in his comments to the group. New Jersey is also touting its progressive politics as a draw.
Newark will be the site of one of the new production facilities, Great Point Studios, which will be built on the former site of a public housing complex. The $125 million development is a partnership between TV and film producer Robert Halmi, the Hollywood studio Lionsgate and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. It will be 300,000 square feet and have five sound stages.
In addition, streaming giant Netflix is investing roughly $1 billion to build a large studio complex on a 300-acre site spanning Eatontown and Oceanport at Fort Monmouth. There is also a studio facility, 1888 Studios, planned for Bayonne, and another studio complex slated for Carteret.
“We’re at the dawn of a new renaissance for the New Jersey film industry,” Sullivan said.
But there are plenty of challenges. There had been a surge in demand for TV and movie production space as streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV and Paramount Plus needed original programming. But the strikes hurt the entertainment industry financially, and Netflix had been cutting its production even before the labor disputes. And New Jersey has fierce competition from California and New York for production.
Sullivan told CoStar News that this week members of the EDA staff and the governor’s office will accompany him to Hollywood to meet with “pretty much all the big studios.” It’s not the first such trip, as Sullivan said in January he made a similar journey with Murphy and first Lady Tammy Snyder Murphy, who is now running for the U.S. Senate seat of indicted fellow Democrat Bob Menendez.
Even without big studios being opened up yet, the Garden State has seen a bustling business from film and TV producers, according to Steven Gorelick, executive director of the New Jersey Motion Picture & Television Commission. He was a speaker on one of the summit’s panels on Monday and said such productions recently generated $700 million annually for the state.
“Film and TV is booming in New Jersey,” Sullivan said.
The films that were shot in Newark alone include “Joker,” starring Joaquin Phoenix, and “The Many Saints of Newark,” a prequel to HBO’s series “The Sopranos.” The “Many Saints” production got the go-ahead from Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and his administration to transform Branford Place and take it back to the 1960s, when protests and riots broke out, according to Gorelick.
“Newark is a place where people come if they can’t get it done in New York if it’s too intricate, or whatever,” Gorelick said. “And the cooperation here has been amazing.”
Movie making and TV production are viewed as part of Newark’s continuing economic rebound, which includes a large pipeline of multifamily and other projects. The summit was held at Ironside Newark, an old downtown warehouse at 110 Edison Place that was repurposed into office space by developer Edison Properties. The property is now home to the headquarters of global candymaker Mars Wrigley Confectionery, and consultant McKinsey & Co. is close to finalizing a lease to relocate 700 employees there from Summit and Jersey City, New Jersey.
New Jersey still has tough rivals when it comes to attracting movie and film production, not only facilities in California but in Georgia and neighboring New York.
Internationally, Los Angeles remains the leader in terms of overall stage space, with 6.2 million square feet, according to FilmLA. The United Kingdom has an estimated 5.4 million square feet of dedicated stage space. Ontario ranks third with 3.8 million feet of dedicated stage space, followed by Georgia with 3 million, New York with 2.8 million, and British Columbia with 2.5 million, according to LAFilm.
In the New York tri-state area, Astoria and Long Island City in the New York borough of Queens have roughly half of all sound stage construction underway in the region, according to a CBRE report in June. Sullivan is undaunted by competitors.
“We’re not going to be, you know, maybe not No. 1,” he said during his presentation. “But we’re shooting for a strong game, No. 2.”
Sullivan later told CoStar News, “We think New Jersey’s the ideal place to film. It’s got all the resources on the tax credit side. It’s got great locations. We’ve got great studios. We’ve got the right values. That’s increasingly important. So whether it’s compared to a place like Georgia or other places, you want to film in a place that’s going to make your talent feel welcome. And we think New Jersey does that better than anybody else … whether it’s women’s reproductive freedom, LGBT rights, or whatever.”
CBRE is also bullish on the Garden State’s prospects.
“New Jersey’s generous film incentives program has rapidly made the state a major contender in the race to attract film and television productions,” the brokerage said in its report. “While a growing number of productions are flocking to the state, the industry’s growth is constrained by a lack of large and modern sound stage inventory — a limitation that is rapidly being rectified.”
Three film studios have opened in New Jersey since 2021, concentrated on the Hudson River waterfront, according to CBRE.
“These will soon be joined by a new Lionsgate Newark campus — New Jersey’s first ground-up studio complex — which will feature six sound stages of 20,000 square feet apiece,” CBRE’s report said. “The project will nearly double New Jersey’s sound stage inventory, vastly expanding the state’s capacity for production. Other mega projects remain on the drawing board and continue to inch forward including a Hollywood-style campus for 1888 Studios in Bayonne and a new Netflix campus on the site of the shuttered Fort Monmouth military installation. If completed, the Netflix campus would be among the largest film studios in the Tri-State area.”
During his comments at the summit, Sullivan pointed out that New Jersey was once the hub of the U.S. film industry, and that Thomas Edison invented the motion picture camera in West Orange.
“We were Hollywood before there was a Hollywood,” Sullivan said.