On May 13, as Netflix broke ground to redevelop 292 acres in Central New Jersey for a massive $848 million new film and TV production facility with 12 soundstages, Fort Monmouth County commissioner director Thomas Arnone made an offer to co-CEO Ted Sarandos, who was on hand. “We will make this easy for you,” Arnone said.

That may well be the state’s promise to Hollywood producers. Even as California Gov. Gavin Newsom managed to get his legislature to double its cap on incentives from $330 million to $750 million annually, he conceded on July 2 at a press conference that the state had taken its eye off the ball for years. “We put our feet up, we took things for granted,” Newsom said. 

The Garden State has been a big beneficiary of infrastructure projects, which once may have defaulted to Burbank, heading far outside of Hollywood’s 30-mile zone. “New Jersey offers the best of both worlds: proximity to New York without the complexity, and a state government that’s deeply invested in growing the industry the right way,” Gannon Murphy, co-founder and president of the state’s film-industry advocacy group Screen Alliance New Jersey (SANJ), told The Hollywood Reporter. “Productions aren’t just saving money here — they’re finding purpose-built facilities, reliable crews, and a serious commitment to the work.”

Murphy is also the operator of the Jersey City’s Cinelease Studios, which for New Jersey was the first of those “purpose-built spaces” that he mentioned. It certainly was not the state’s first space used as a studio, however. Cinelease has three soundstages (each with 40 feet of clearance height) totaling 67,600 sq. ft. It also has 8,100 sq. ft. of office space, plenty of power and more than 60 designated parking spots. It has hosted TV and film productions like Wild ‘N’ Out season 17, Dumb Money, A Murder at the End of the World and American Horror Stories season three. Its Caven Point location has made Jersey City one of the state’s production hotspots.

Even where SANJ put on the NJ Film Expo — the mostly-shuttered Meadowlands sports arena — in May has been used as a TV production space. Since 2018, NBCUniversal has leased the venue to film primetime dramas like Lincoln Rhyme: Hunt for the Bone Collector and The Enemy Within; Tales of the Walking Dead and The Walking Dead: Dead City have also filmed there.

Across the Newark Bay lies another destination for Hollywood productions. Desireè Hadley, who manages the Newark Office of Film and TV, told THR it is Newark’s “historic-looking buildings and architecture” that make it “desirable for period pieces.”

“We are always one of the locations where folks come if they want to do something that’s filmed in the ‘80s or the ‘70s, especially if it’s like New York City 1980s,” Hadley said.

Newark has undergone what Hadley called “an artistic explosion” ever since Ras J. Baraka, a poet and a former educator, became mayor. “Newark was made for the big screen, with every possible location and ambiance a director could ask for. Our sidewalks, alleys and park paths feature figures from central casting and our workforce is primed to cover every need from craft services, to camera crew, to feature length soundtracks,” Baraka told THR. “Most of all, Newark has a can-do vibe that is fresh and contagious, and sure to add extra magic to any set.”

If you need an indoor location in Baraka’s town, look no further than Newark Film Studios.

Newark Film Studios occupies the former National Newark & Essex Banking Company headquarters, first built in 1930. The timeless space centers on a mezzanine featuring iconic gold doors and accents. It can easily be dressed up or down for everything from a Roaring Twenties feel to a midcentury-modern aesthetic or even present day. There, movies like West Side Story (2021) and A Complete Unknown filmed scenes, as did TV series like The Plot Against America (2020) and The Equalizer, among others. (Queen Latifah’s The Equalizer, a spinoff of the Denzel Washington movies that aired on CBS from 2021-2025, is credited at basically every production space in New Jersey.)

Like Cinealease, the old bank, which before this whole Hollywood East thing was occupied by Verizon, has generous ceiling heights throughout, on-site parking and office space used for film and post-production on various floors. It wasn’t purpose-built, but it serves the purpose.

The near-100-year-old building is “a blank canvas to meet [the] needs” of film productions, Newark Film Studios founder Joseph Dabbah told THR. “Whether that’s a raw space for set construction or a period interior for a story setting, we try to make it work without overcomplicating things.”

Crucially, Newark, like Jersey City, Montclair, Bayonne and Hoboken, lies within a 35-mile circle of Manhattan’s Columbus Circle. That’s not just for convenience, it circumvents union upcharges.

The rule (basically) works like this: IATSE demands higher wages and hotel stays for its members on productions outside of the 35-mile radius. Inside is considered to be home base, a contractually-acceptable daily commute. Netflix’s under-construction Fort Monmouth campus lies outside of that bubble.

“Being 20 minutes from New York City by public transit and offering straightforward on-site parking makes a huge difference,” Dabbah said of Newark. “Productions avoid the logistical headaches and high costs of Manhattan while keeping access to talent and crew.”

The train is great, sure — especially if you want to film some on this side of the NJ/NY border and some on the other side — but what Newark also has going for it is a true international airport.

Importing New York talent to a place like Newark is simple. But you’d be making a mistake not to look more locally as well, Diane Raver, the executive director of the New Jersey Film Academy, and Patricia Piroh, the director of production and technology for broadcast and media operations at Montclair State University, both told THR (independently).

“The best crews live here,” Raver said.

Raver began her career in TV commercial production, and has filmed “all over the world,” she said, including 20 years in New York City — but she found that “the most diverse and easy place to shoot” was New Jersey. OK, so maybe she’s a bit of a homer. “You can cheat almost any location here, since we have it all,” said Raver, who is from the beach town of Sea Girt, a pretty cool location itself.

There’s a ton of beach in New Jersey, something you can find in Los Angeles but not in Canada, another hotbed of Hollywood production flight. “Good luck filming a beach scene in Toronto,” Tim Sullivan, the CEO of New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA), quipped to THR.

And it’s not simply “urban” or “beach.” Go rewatch the Sopranos “Pine Barrens” episode, film in the dense woods of South Jersey. “Unless you’re filming a moon landing or the Sahara, you could pretty much do it in New Jersey,” Sullivan said.

You could probably pull those off too. New Jersey’s “rich tapestry of locations…can stand in for other parts of the U.S. — and even the world,” Piroh told THR.

But we’ve put the cart before the horse here, because New Jersey’s real carrot is its tax-incentive program. It’s show-business, right?

The state’s tax-credit program is among the most generous in the country. Qualifying productions can receive a credit for up to 35 percent of qualifying costs. The hoops to jump through aren’t that huge either. They’re: 1) the productions qualifying expenses must exceed $1 million in New Jersey spend, and 2) 60 percent of the total production expenses (exclusive of post-production costs) must be incurred for services and goods purchased through vendors authorized to do business in New Jersey.

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy told THR that the best thing about New Jersey’s film tax incentive program isn’t even about how much money they’re willing to allocate, but rather for how long they’re willing to allocate it. The New Jersey Film and Digital Media Tax Credit Program has already been extended through June 30, 2039. It’s an “explicit statement that this is not about us,” Murphy said, “this is about generations to come.”

Though Murphy is on his way out as governor, the program has bipartisan support, Sullivan said. Thus far, it has helped make New Jersey the sixth-largest state for film and TV productions, according to an April 8, 2025 study by ProdPro.

“The state is clearly invested in building a real production ecosystem here,” Dabbah said. “They’re not just talking about tax credits — they’re actively helping productions find sites, navigate permitting, and plan out stages that are still under construction.”

Minimizing red tape has been a major sales pitch beyond the boundaries of Los Angeles County. Elsewhere, places that want to attract film and TV production act like they actually want the business. Crazy we know. Look no further than the fact that it took until 2025 for “Stay in L.A.” to become a real rallying cry for California production insiders.

New Jersey is clearly thrilled to have Netflix, but officials are not yet satisfied. It wants others to set up shop here as well — and to never pack up and leave.

“One of the knocks on some tax credit programs around the country is that [they are set up to] have a production blow through town. It’s exciting for three or four weeks. Everyone’s excited, and then they leave. That’s fun to have that three or four weeks and it has real economic impact, but are you in the longterm, permanent-job creation [business]?” Sullivan said. “If you have a good film tax credit program, you should have production coming through town regularly. Three three-to-four-month assignments is a year’s worth of work for a hair and makeup person, or a cater or whatever. What we’re really trying to do is encourage brick-and-mortar construction for longterm job creation.”

Well, the mortar is being applied to the bricks beyond Netflix’s central-New Jersey former Army base location. For example, Lionsgate is in the process of building a 350,000 square foot studio in Newark. That sounds huge — and it is — until you consider what’s going on in Bayonne.

With up to $400 million of Sullivan’s (organization’s) money, 1888 Studios, a 23-soundstage, 58-acre production hub in Bayonne is in the works. It will be “the largest and first campus-style film and television studio facility in the Northeast,” per the NJEDA.

Headed way down the New Jersey Turnpike to Atlantic City, which 15 years ago famously lost out on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire (about Prohibition-era A.C.) to Brooklyn and Staten Island, ACX1 Films has proposed building over a massive pier on the Atlantic Ocean. The plan is for the facility to host “more ready-to-shoot films sets than any other studio on the east coast.”

New Jersey, the 47th largest state in the United States by area, is thinking big. California, consider this your notice.

A version of this story appeared in the July 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.