New Jersey Is The New Hollywood, The Numbers Don't Lie

The overall volume of film and television production in the United States was down approximately 20 percent as studios and streamers tightened their budgets, and exactly one state saw substantial gains: New Jersey. In 2025, 73 projects used the state's film incentive program, up from 46 the year before, with production spending estimated to top $1 billion, up from $833 million. The state is now on track to become the third-largest film and television production hub in the country, trailing only New York and California. Steven Spielberg shot Disclosure Day in Montville. Timothée Chalamet played Bob Dylan on the streets of Hoboken. Denzel Washington filmed in Newark. The perception of the state, long defined by Tony Soprano and reality television, is changing in direct proportion to the quality of what is being made there. Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics and a New Jersey resident, captures the shift simply: before, the image was not the greatest. Now you have Spielberg shooting there, and it's all thanks to the rebate. The state's competitive tax incentive program, which allows eligible productions to recover a significant percentage of qualified in-state expenses, is the engine behind the transformation.

The infrastructure catching up to the momentum is extraordinary in its scale. In December 2025, developers broke ground on 1888 Studios in Bayonne, a 1.6-million-square-foot production campus on a former refinery site with 23 soundstages, 340,000 square feet of mill space, and a 20-acre water backlot. Paramount has already signed a minimum 10-year lease for over 285,000 square feet. Lionsgate is building a $125 million studio in Newark's South Ward, with 70 percent of full-time positions reserved for Newark residents. Netflix is transforming the former Fort Monmouth military installation into an East Coast production hub with 12 soundstages totaling nearly 500,000 square feet, expected to open in 2028. The state currently has 70 active stages with 30 more expected in the next two years. New Jersey film officials prefer not to use the phrase Hollywood East. Their preferred framing, which captures something true about how the industry got started, is that Hollywood is New Jersey West: Thomas Edison built the world's first film studio, the Black Maria, in West Orange in 1893, and Fort Lee was America's first motion picture industry headquarters. The cameras left over a century ago. They are coming back.

Source:https://variety.com/2026/film/features/new-jersey-film-industry-production-hub-1236831994/