Dive into Newfoundland and Labrador’s rich folklore, with tales of monsters, mermaids and fairies that long shaped its storytelling traditions, and you’ll discover why movies and TV series shot on this enchanted island off Canada’s east coast have cast a spell over audiences worldwide.
“Once you know the location and the beauty of this place — and there’s also this hard-rock-in-the-middle-of-the-ocean kind of feeling — it just becomes this magical place people want to learn more about and what we do and what kind of stories we tell,” says Laura Churchill, CEO of PictureNL, which supports local production and markets the province to Hollywood for location shooting.
As Hollywood embraces this hard rock in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, the Canadian province has passed the $1 billion mark in production expenditures since PictureNL launched in 1997. An early milestone: The province’s fog-shrouded and craggy shoreline of rock and ocean drew director Lasse Hallström to get his cameras rolling on the 2001 drama The Shipping News.
More recently, the region’s stunning local landscapes were featured in a second-season episode of Apple TV+’s Severance directed by Ben Stiller, and this summer Newfoundland has played host to an untitled sea creature thriller from Netflix.
Then there’s the province’s sun-bleached, feel-good landscapes and scenery, which were featured in Disney’s 2023 live-action film Peter Pan & Wendy, starring Jude Law, Yara Shahidi and Jim Gaffigan. And the third season of Prime Video’s Reacher, where Alan Ritchson as Jack Reacher lays waste to bad buys amid the colorful row houses of St. John’s that doubled for a fictional Abbotsville, Maine.
Actor-producer Allan Hawco, whose Take Shot Productions produced the locally shot comic drama Republic of Doyle, in which he played the titular detective Jake Doyle, helped build a local industry with follow-up series like Frontier, starring Jason Momoa, Son of a Critch and more recently Saint-Pierre. “There’s just something about the place that’s magical, and has inspired a creativity that’s woven deep into what we are as a place and people, and it’s everywhere,” Hawco explains.
Of course, the magic of “Hollywood on the Rock” also comes from currency savings and the province’s film tax credits. “Obviously, the Canadian dollar is extremely competitive when you look at the American dollar. And we’ve really dug in deep for a competitive tax credit,” Churchill says.
The province offers a refundable 40 percent all-spend tax credit applying to all eligible production costs. The 40 percent tax credit also matches every dollar spent on eligible local labor with non-local labor expenditures on both above- and below-the-line crewmembers.
“It’s really set the bar, because we have a strong crew base, but everyone’s going to be bringing their keys and the specialized departments that we just might not have here. So it allows people to receive a tax credit that they’d likely not receive in other jurisdictions,” Churchill adds.
The competitive incentives aim to draw American producers that may otherwise shoot originals in established Hollywood production hubs like Ontario and British Columbia. And the financial incentives have unleashed a surge of opportunity and confidence as Newfoundland grows its profile in the locations business internationally.
Churchill recalls the recent Severance episode shoot, which took place in remote coastal locations around the Bonavista Peninsula and on Fogo Island, allowing the local industry to “show Newfoundland off in a different, more gritty, darker way, rather than the sunshiny coastal look.”
That was followed by production on an untitled six-part Netflix thriller from creator Jesse McKeown that stars Josh Hartnett and centers on a mysterious sea creature terrorizing a remote coastal town. Churchill hopes Netflix will find a way to capture the hunt for a sea creature in the province’s unspoiled landscape and pristine shorelines ahead of a possible second season.
“It would be exciting for a project of that scale and scope to achieve what they wanted here, with the incentives and the crew and the locations, that they would come back for a second time. That is always the goal here,” she insists. Allison White, a veteran local producer on shoots for Severance, Peter Pan & Wendy and The King Tide, a 2023 horror thriller about a remote island where a child with mysterious powers arrives on its shores, cites the support of PictureNL and the provincial government as key to launching and sustaining a local production hub for global producers.
“We’re drawn here for the stunning, one-of-a-kind locations that bring so much character to the screen. Those same remote and rugged places can present their own challenges. But PictureNL goes above and beyond to support producers to actualize what they need, and that level of support is truly unmatched anywhere else,” White says.
As is typical in Hollywood, referrals have helped the province land repeat business with content creators.
Churchill recalls Severance cinematographer-turned-director Jessica Lee Gagné working on a French-language movie, Pays, that shot on spectacularly eerie Fogo Island. Gagné then pitched Stiller on going to that remote island, which she envisioned as the perfect setting for his episode.
“What’s cool about that is she was here one time, a number of years ago, but it remained in the forefront of her brain when she was making a creative decision, because of how beautiful and how well [the island] could work for the story,” explains Churchill.
Another repeat customer is Momoa, who first came to the province to star in the Netflix and Discovery Canada’s 18th century drama Frontier, where he played an outlaw trapper out to breach the Hudson’s Bay Company monopoly on the Canadian fur trade. The actor returned to shoot some scenes for Aquaman, where the Atlantic stood in for Atlantis.
And Momoa liked the East Coast island enough to also star in a local shoot for Braven, an action thriller about a father and son protecting their family in a wilderness cabin from a band of drug runners. “Look at Jason Momoa,” says Hawco of his star turn on Frontier for three seasons. “He used to walk into our production offices every day with giant shopping bags filled with local stuff. He’d be promoting it on social media. It’s promoting us to the world in a way that you just can’t quantify.”
On the soundstages front, Latitude 47 Studios, backed by a private consortium led by Schitt’s Creek producer Andrew Barnsley, has plans on the drawing board for a 75,000-square-foot studio to be built in the town of Bauline, about a half hour’s drive from St. John’s. The plans call for two 20,000-square-foot soundstages and one 10,000-square-foot soundstage.
Said Barnsley in a statement: “After having shot in Newfoundland and Labrador for years — and being the first generation of my family to be raised away — I can’t wait to come home and welcome the world to this superb filming destination.”