If you watch the movie “Gone Girl” and enjoy it, be sure to thank the people sitting around you.
Assuming that you’re in a Missouri theater, many of them helped pay for the film even before they bought tickets. Missouri taxpayers provided 20th Century Fox with $2.36 million in subsidies for “Gone Girl,” which stars Ben Affleck.
The movie caused a lot of excitement in Cape Girardeau during filming last year, and it will bring a few tourists who want to see the locations that made up the fictional town of New Carthage.
Star-struck lawmakers, though, should let this be the last big Hollywood film financed with Missouri taxpayers’ help. The state’s film production tax credit expired last November, having provided nearly $18 million in credits to filmmakers since 2000.
The movie industry, of course, wants to revive the credit, and it will use the positive buzz generated by “Gone Girl” to bolster its case. But if lawmakers look beyond the Hollywood hype, they’ll see that subsidizing film production is a losing proposition for the state.
Every independent study of similar programs in other states shows a negative net fiscal benefit. In other words, the new activity that filmmaking stimulates — the hiring of extras, the hotel rooms and restaurant tables filled by crew members — generates less tax revenue than the state gives away to the filmmakers.
Not only that, but most jobs created by the credits are only temporary, and they come at a high cost. In Cape Girardeau, according to figures provided by state Sen. John Lamping, R-Ladue, moviemakers hired 116 Missourians for two months. Calculated on a full-year, full-time-equivalent basis, each of those jobs cost the state $122,000.
Joseph Henchman, a vice president at the Tax Foundation in Washington, says no state can claim that its subsidies have created a permanent film industry. “The industry makes perfectly clear that as soon as you stop subsidizing, they’ll leave,” he says.
Thirty-six states currently provide moviemaking tax credits, down from a high of 40. States that have wised up, in addition to Missouri, include Connecticut, North Carolina and Oklahoma.
In Michigan, a study found that the state was spending up to $193,000 for each full-time job created. Massachusetts learned that it was getting just a 13-cent return on every dollar in credits.
Illinois, which handed out $39.3 million in filmmaking credits last year, has never studied the program’s effectiveness, says Michael Lucci, director of jobs and growth at the Illinois Policy Institute.
Read the rest of the story at slttoday.com