NYC Production Boom Sees Permits And Spending Surge, Sound Stages Max Out: “We Are Bursting At The Seams”

New York City Film Commissioner Rafael Espinal, seated in February by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, may be the first in the job to see New York production spend outstrip California.

A sweetened New York State tax incentive, one of the best in the nation, has converged with faster permitting and smoother communications across city agencies under Espinal into a post-strike production boom across the five boroughs. Green shoots had appeared late last year, Espinal tells Deadline, but even he and his team were surprised this summer by how robust a recovery was taking hold.

The Mayor’s Office of Media & Entertainment’s monthly tallies of permits and projects around the city have surged year-on-year and month-by-month in 2026. Soundstages are full.

According to data platform ProdPro, production spend in New York outpaced all other U.S. states in the third quarter, rising 87% to $1.61 billion, following a 54% jump in Q2.

The state is No. 2 overall after California, where spending rose 17% to $1.76 billion. The gap is about the size of a major motion picture, Espinal notes gleefully.

“We’ll get there,” he tells Deadline.

“We are bursting at the seams again, which hadn’t been the case for two, three years,” says Doug Steiner, chairman of Steiner Studios, home of series and films from The Diplomat to Disclosure Day. Things started cooking at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in July and August, with the complex now booked out through next summer. On any given day now, there are 1,500 to 2,000 people on site.

“We have a lot of people here,” he marvels. “The work came back pretty much all as a wave, at once. We’re used to having things more staggered in terms of who’s at what stage of the production cycle, and it smooths out some of our lot operations. And now we have all it at once, so it will take a little while to space out.” But it’s a good problem to have, he acknowledges. Steiner Studios has about 30 sound stages.

“We’re completely full,” echoes Wildflower Studios managing partner and founder Adam Gordon.

He and co-founder and partner Raphael De Niro, along with Raphael’s father Robert, opened Wildflower in the fall of 2024 in Astoria, Queens after a long development process and during a period of slow production and rising competition from neighboring New Jersey and elsewhere.

“It’s humming. A couple of weeks ago, we had around 725 people here, which I think is our highest count to date. It’s great to see the place with six or 700 people around. A living, breathing organism. It’s amazing,” says Raphael De Niro. It started to fill up in the spring and now has a waitlist of productions.

Wildflower’s first feature, Universal’s Focker-in-Law, the latest in the Meet The Fockers franchise (starring Robert De Niro), is set for release November 25 and was a proof of concept for the unusual seven-story vertical facility. “Once Focker shot and people loved it — and Severance is here, and others — once people had worked here, they start telling their community and that rippled out to demand,” he says.

Overall, total U.S. production spending rose in Q3, a trend that started in early 2026 after declining year-over-year in all four quarters of 2025, according to ProdPro. New York’s recovery started earlier and the state has now recorded four consecutive quarters of year-over-year spending growth starting in Q4 2025. New York City accounts for about 80% of New York State production, the firm said.

MOME city permit data, which doesn’t include sound stage production, shows a 21% increase on average from January-September 2026 compared to 2025. In 2025, nine out of 12 months were lower compared to 2024. In 2026, with the exception of February (where productions were pulled due to a severe winter storm), every month has been higher compared to 2025. June, July, August and September 2026 were all the highest levels since pre-strike year 2022.

After California and New York, ProdPro’s No. 3 market for production spending last quarter was Georgia, which rose 32% to $459 million. Numbers 4, 5 and 6 – New Jersey, New Mexico and Illinois — all fell.

The firm tracks global scripted, live-action TV and feature film productions with estimated budgets of $1 million or more commissioned by major U.S distribution platforms.

New Jersey offers an attractive credit but may currently be ceding some work to New York due to lack of capacity as it waits for a few big facilities to come online: Lionsgate Studios Newark is slated to open in 2027; Skydance is the anchor tenant for 1888 Studios, a production campus under construction in Bayonne; and Netflix is developing a major East Coast production hub at the former Fort Monmouth Army base in Monmouth County.

Faster payout

Key to New York’s resurgence was Gov. Kathy Hochul’s FY26 budget that included an enhanced package of production incentives running through 2036.

The state offers a base 30% incentive with regional step-ups. A $700 million annual allocation was raised by $100 million with fresh funds for independent projects. A Production Plus Program provides additional tax credits – up to 10% more – for larger productions. A $500,000 cap on per-person above-the-line labor costs was eliminated, although there are still ATL restrictions.

There were tweaks to post-production and VFX-animation credits and a new element for music scoring costs (eligible for an additional 10% incentive as long as five musicians are hired to perform work in New York State).

A key change is called Accelerated Recovery of Credit – or speeding up the process. The state previously paid out credits for $5 million or more over three years, beginning with the allocation year, a delay that made it harder to lock in financing and proved a major headache for producers. Now, they can claim the full credit in the first year.

At a screening this week for Season 4 of HBO’s The Gilded Age, Casey Bloys, co-chair and chief content officer of Skydance Direct-to-Consumer, gave a shout-out to the New York incentive, saying it enabled the popular period drama “to shoot about 100 days in New York State, in New York City, in Troy, in Schenectady, and other locations.”

“Last year, if you were here, I had mentioned that one of the benefits we have of shooting in New York is access to Broadway talent, and I am happy to say that we continued that trend and built on it. For Season 4, we welcomed 200 Broadway actors and dancers to the cast… So thank you to New York State for that.”

Espinal said it took some time for the industry to register the change in the state incentive, which is something he started pounding home to financiers and producers as soon as he took the job.

He’s also engaged in an ongoing “listening tour” across the local film and TV industry because, as he told Deadline in May, you can’t just “tax credit” away the problem.

“He is the guy who holds doors open, and that’s what New York City, like every place else, needs,” says Wildflower’s Gordon. “Because whether it’s getting a permit to operate on a street, or solving another problem, or making an introduction, he is that hospitality element, which is so critical and so critically overlooked. Many cities suffer from bureaucracy. He relieves that to make it a more attractive place for people to film.”

The new norm?

Wildflower is one of a handful of costly New York City complexes to launch in recent years into what’s been a tumultuous time for the sound-stage business on both coasts.

An abundance of supply has put downward pressure on rates. In NYC, producers have been able to secure discounts, which are narrowing as work picks up but still significant. That’s contributed to financial pressure on stage owners. With studios expensive propositions to build, buy and run, it’s been challenging to service debt amid a years-long downturn, especially on older properties.

In April, Deutsche Bank filed a foreclosure complaint against historic Kaufman Astoria Studios and its then-owner Hackman Capital Partners, alleging a default on a $340 million loan. Shadowbox Studios has taken on management of the campus.

Hackman acquired Kauffman Astoria in 2021 in a sound-stage buying spree that included New York’s Silvercup Studios, which has lots in Long Island City and in the Bronx, as well as Radford Studio Center, which services Hollywood from the San Fernando Valley. The real estate developer defaulted on the latter property early this year and it’s being shopped by Goldman Sachs.

“The debt has not been sustainable,” says one longtime industry executive. “There’s been a slow burn of work coming back … But how do you read a crystal ball going forward? That, to me, is the unknown. The consistency of the New York recovery. Is this the new norm, or will it go backwards again? Because productions can go anywhere at any time.”