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NYC's Movie Comeback Gets Boost From a $1 Billion Robert De Niro Studio
The Manhattan-born actor is among those who are leading a drive to ensure the city regains its status in the Hollywood pantheon.
Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II, and Jimmy ‘The Gent’ Conway in Goodfellas: They weren’t just indelible Robert De Niro characters, but also New Yorkers who elevated the city into a character all its own in the movies they inhabited.
But in the years since De Niro roamed the Big Apple’s streets in those roles, New York’s once distinctive mark on celluloid has faded. Now, the Manhattan-born actor and producer is working to ensure the city regains its status in the Hollywood pantheon.
De Niro just opened Wildflower Studios — an 11-sound-stage campus in Queens that cost about $1 billion — with his son Raphael and business partner Adam Gordon. Their aim: to bring a new level of technology to production in the city, where many studios are converted warehouses instead of purpose-built facilities.
“We came to this from a position of trying to be helpful and supportive for the city that we both love,” Gordon said about himself and De Niro. “We’re both fourth-generation New Yorkers.”
They’re far from alone as developers ramp up bets on studios in the area. Hallmark Channel founder Robert Halmi is in the process of wrapping construction on a 1 million-square-foot campus for his Great Point Studios in Yonkers. Blackstone Inc. and Vornado Realty Trust are building Sunset Pier 94 Studios, the first designated film studio in Manhattan, which is set to open next year by the Hudson River. East End Studios, a roughly 350,000-square-foot space, is slated for completion next year in Queens.
The boom is unfolding amid an entertainment-industry slowdown, even as a flood of new sound stages is in the pipeline globally. In New York, developers and producers are also seeking to capitalize on a recent boost to the state fund providing tax credits to film and television productions.
Governor Kathy Hochul last year increased funding to $700 million a year from $420 million, and made 30% of qualified production expenses tax deductible, up from 25%. The measure also accelerated the timeline for claiming credits and offered additional incentives for filming upstate. To qualify, productions are expected to shoot 75% in the state.
“You can go somewhere else and get iconic New York for a few days. But we want them to come here. We want them to use our stages. We want them to hire our crews,” said Pat Kaufman, Commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment.
Read full article on Bloomberg.com
Great Point Studios Lionsgate
Wildflower Studios PHYGITAL FX Goldcrest Post Hudson Scenic Studios
