“Ballers” will continue balling on the Golden State’s dime — as will “S.W.A.T.,” “Shooter” and “The Orville.”
The Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson-series scored another cool $6.8 million from the California Film Commission’s tax credit program. That Season 4 sum is higher than the allocation for the sophomore turn of Shemar Moore’s CBS cop drama, which landed about $6 million for its next run. Both are lower than the $8.2 million earmarked for Season 3 of USA Network’s “Shooter.”
Though surely no one from those three subsidized series are complaining, their monies don’t come close to Fox’s “The Orville,” (pictured above) which will haul in $14.5 million to produce Season 2 locally. It’s not cheap to shoot in space, so this is a win/win.
For this group, a total of $69 million in tax credits was reserved for 11 projects — which also includes three pilots and four new TV series.
The pilots are “Euphoria” (Cooler Waters Productions), “Harmony” (Touchstone Television Productions) and “Less Than Zero” (Pacific 2.1 Entertainment Group). The freshmen shows are Ridley Scott’s “Strange Angel” (CBS Studios), “The Rookie” (Touchstone Television Productions), “Untitled Peacock Project” (Hop Skip & Jump Productions) and Mark Burnett’s “Untitled Old Story Pictures Project” (Old Story Pictures).
“Television drives much of the industry’s long-term employment and economic activity, so we’re gratified to see the tax credit program help keep so much TV production here at home,” said California Film Commission executive director Amy Lemisch. “Tens of thousands of cast and crew members, as well as support service vendors, are working in California on TV projects thanks to the expanded tax credit program.”
Here’s the allocation for all 11 projects:
This is the third fiscal year of the 2.0 iteration of the tax credit program. Projects are selected based on their jobs ratio score, which ranks each project by wages to below-the-line workers, qualified spending for vendors and equipment, etc.