Film Incentives: A Battle Royale

I get somewhat hypnotized by those bargraph races showing the richest billionaires and biggest brands over decades. Claude Code will just generate crazy good infographics, even animations, so I asked it to build and animate an interactive graph of Colorado inside the film incentive race. The data and the linear race path turned out to not be so straight forward.  

The data was easy to mine for, but no two states measure their own commitment to incentives the same way. Georgia and Massachusetts publish clean, audited numbers every year, because they wanted the industry to see the spend. Other states bury the real figures in fiscal notes nobody reads, or don't disclose them at all. Finding the honest bookkeeping turned out to be its own kind of story, where the states that took this seriously were the ones willing to be measured.

Somewhere in the middle of this, the word I kept using just didn’t apply anymore. This was never a race with a starting line everyone agrees to and a finish everyone runs toward. There is no shared game clock, and states show up when they choose to, spend what they can, and leave at their own will, sometimes for good. It's closer to a battle royale, you drop into the arena or you hang back on the sidelines, you go all in, or you seppuku. The fight itself never ends.

Take Michigan in 2015, who dropped in hard and eliminated itself in a single vote, since gone. Over the years, Louisiana has pulled back twice, but is still standing. Georgia went no-cap, past a billion dollars a year. What I was really watching was Colorado, who stepped into the arena around 2010, when the governor and his new film commissioner led the charge. It had, and still has merit, but the gray flat line in the Graph below is the data telling a story. 

Of course none of this is the whole story. Incentives don't make films good or bad, don't decide whether the work matters, don't explain why some places build a film industry and others don't. 

Compared to the 6 other states, Colorado sits alongside the states that stayed flat or barely showed up. There are questions that take shape over time with something like this. Does a place have to fight for the monetary valuation of its culture for it to be real? Is staying near the edge its own kind of risk, quieter than the ones that show up on a chart, but a risk all the same? Or is the political will, or lack thereof, behind it a form of calculated risk. A prudent uncle who hands you a handful of bills to play the slot machines, but not the tables. 

I don't have the answer. I've just been standing here long enough to look past the race and finally see the shape of the arena.