Ocalawood
Oh Cala Wood.
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If you've ever driven north out of Orlando on Interstate 75, somewhere around the time the suburbs thin out and the land starts to roll, you begin to notice that you've crossed into a different Florida. The flat coastal Florida of postcards is behind you. The Florida in front of you has hills, real hills by Florida standards, with white-board fences running along the ridges and thoroughbreds grazing in pastures that look like somebody airlifted them out of Kentucky. The exits start carrying horse names. The road signs point to the World Equestrian Center, a place so large and so deliberate that it changed the conversation about what Ocala is and what Ocala could become. And out beyond those horse farms, along the commerce corridors, you'll see something else. Warehouses. Big ones. New ones. Steel rising on what used to be pine flats and pasture. The trucks moving in and out tell you that the rest of the world has figured out something the locals have known for a while: this part of Florida is positioned at the intersection of just about everywhere.
Hold that picture in your mind, because we have a question to chew on for the next little while. Could the Ocala metropolitan area, the heart of Florida and the country just north of Orlando, be poised for a film, television, and video production boom? Could the same combination of land, infrastructure, beauty, and cost advantage that's drawn equestrian sport, retirees, distribution centers, and breeders also draw the cameras? I'm not going to tell you yes and I'm not going to tell you no. The honest answer is more interesting than either. But by the time we ride out of this together, you'll have a clearer picture of where the industry is, where Florida is, what Ocala has, and what would have to happen if the forward-thinking minds in this region decided that the next chapter was going to be theirs to write.
Now, before we get to Ocala, we have to take an honest look at where the picture business actually stands. Because if we don't understand what's happening to Hollywood and why, we'll either oversell what's possible here or undersell it. Both are mistakes.
There's a story going around out west that just about tells the whole tale. A television producer was putting together a game show. He had Rob Lowe lined up to host. He had contestants ready to play. And when he set the cost of filming in Los Angeles next to the cost of flying the whole production to Ireland, Ireland won. Not by a nickel either. By enough to make the decision easy. So they packed up Rob Lowe, packed up the contestants, packed up the cameras, and off they went across the Atlantic. That one decision, by one producer, on one show, captures more about the modern entertainment business than a thousand pages of trade press.
For a hundred years, Hollywood was the place. If you wanted to make a picture, you came to Los Angeles. The talent lived there. The crews lived there. The stages were there. The vendors were there. You could walk down a street in Burbank and find every craftsman, every camera operator, every costume designer you needed within a five-mile radius. It was the kind of cluster that took a century to build and nobody figured could ever come apart. Well, friend, it's coming apart.
The numbers tell the story plain enough. Last year, on-location shoot days in the greater Los Angeles area dropped to about nineteen thousand seven hundred. That's a sixteen percent fall from the year before and the lowest count in recent memory if you set aside the pandemic shutdown. The first quarter of last year saw a twenty-two percent drop year over year, with television down better than thirty percent and feature films down nearly twenty-nine. There's been no annual increase since 2021. Early 2026 did show a small bump, about ten percent better quarter over quarter, with features leading the way, but the overall level still sits below where it stood in better years. Soundstages that used to run at near full occupancy are sitting at about sixty-three percent. Tens of thousands of jobs have evaporated. Forty-two thousand in entertainment-related sectors in Los Angeles County alone over a couple of years, with the below-the-line folks taking the worst of it. Those are the grips, the gaffers, the prop masters, the caterers, the people who actually build the magic.
An old rancher I knew used to say that when the water dries up, you find out pretty quick which cattle were grazing for love and which were grazing for grass. Hollywood is finding out which productions were there for the talent and the legacy and which were there because that's just where the trail ended. Turns out a lot of them were the second kind.
So why is this happening? It isn't because the talent moved. It isn't because the audiences disappeared. It's because doing business in California got too expensive to pencil out. Start with labor. Wages are high, benefits are high, payroll burdens run anywhere from twenty-eight to thirty-four percent. Workers' compensation costs are eye-watering. Union work rules add expense at every turn. None of this is to say workers don't deserve fair pay. They do, and they earned it. But when you stack it all up, Los Angeles becomes a number that simply will not compete with the numbers a producer can get in Georgia, New Mexico, New York, or overseas.
Then add the real estate. Housing in Los Angeles is a punchline at this point. The crews who used to live thirty minutes from the studio now live three hours away or have left the state entirely. The vendors are getting squeezed by the same costs. The whole ecosystem that made Hollywood Hollywood is being priced out of Hollywood. Then there's the permitting and the regulation. Layer upon layer of process. Sign here, wait here, pay here, do it again.
Here's where I have to stop and admire the situation for a moment. California, the state that prides itself on being the cultural capital of the world, has spent decades writing rules, taxes, and regulations that make it economically irrational to produce culture inside its own borders. Then it acts surprised when the cameras leave. That takes a certain kind of accomplishment. You almost have to applaud it.
To be fair, the state has finally noticed. Last year they expanded the Film and Television Tax Credit Program to seven hundred and fifty million dollars a year. They call it Program 4.0, which is what folks call something when they've already tried three other versions of it. They raised the base credit to thirty-five percent and stretched it as high as forty-five with bonuses. They made the credits more refundable. They broadened who could qualify. FilmLA says there are early signs of recovery. That's good. That's something. But uncapped programs in other states and overseas still beat what California is offering, and tax credits cannot fix the underlying problem. The underlying problem is that everything else in California is too expensive. Some of the analysts are now warning that parts of the Hollywood ecosystem could end up looking like Detroit looked in the 1980s. Detroit didn't lose the automobile. It lost the assumption that everything had to be built in Detroit. Hollywood is losing the assumption that everything has to be shot in Hollywood. Once that assumption is gone, you don't get it back easily.
That's where Hollywood sits. Now let's swing east, because Florida has a story of its own, and you can't talk about Ocala's potential without first understanding what happened to the state it sits in.
Florida used to be a serious player in this business. In the middle of the last decade, the state ranked third nationally on some production metrics, behind only California and New York. The statewide film and entertainment incentive program supported billions of dollars in production spending and tens of thousands of jobs. Crews built careers here. Vendors built businesses here. Universal in Orlando wasn't just a theme park, it was a working production lot, and Disney's Hollywood Studios was once exactly what its name said, an actual working studio. The state was open for business and the cameras knew it.
Then in 2016, the Florida legislature let the statewide incentive program expire. Different people will tell you different things about why. Some will say the program had structural problems and didn't deliver. Some will say short-term political winds blew the wrong way. Some will say nobody fought hard enough to save it. The reasons don't matter as much as the result. The result was a cliff. Producers do not enjoy uncertainty. Producers love a state that says "come on in, here's the math, here's the timeline, here's the rebate." Take that away, and they go somewhere else. They went to Georgia. They went to Louisiana. They went to North Carolina. They went to New Mexico. They went overseas. And Florida watched its production economy thin out like a herd in a dry summer. Estimates suggest the state forfeited over two billion dollars in production spending in the years that followed.
Marion County, Florida once had a serious shot at building a film economy, and much of the credit belongs to Jude Hagin, who served as the dedicated film commissioner for Ocala and Marion County for more than a decade. Operating essentially as a one-woman powerhouse through the Film Commission of Real Florida, Incorporated, she scouted locations, networked with producers, and helped bring ancillary projects, Marion County's most visible Hollywood moment came not from filming Wild Hogs, which was shot almost entirely in New Mexico, but from hosting the movie's hometown premiere at the Marion Theatre in March 2007, anchored by Ocala-area resident John Travolta of nearby Jumbolair Aviation Estates. That event, complete with red carpet, fan meet-and-greets, and a signed motorcycle auction for local causes, illustrated the kind of regional spotlight Ocala can capture when a major star calls it home and somebody on the ground is actively working to leverage the connection.
The Celestine Prophecy, and a steady stream of commercials to the area, Hagin leveraged her contacts and her passion for showcasing North Central Florida as America's backlot. The Celestine Prophecy brought significant production activity to Marion County in 2004 when the Film Commission of Real Florida successfully convinced the filmmakers that Rainbow Springs State Park could double for the jungles of Peru. Principal Ocala-area filming took place at an abandoned rock quarry north of the city, where crews constructed elaborate sets including a church, a jail, a roadblock, and ruins, with interior scenes shot at the local Hilton and a nearby warehouse. Cast and crew stayed in area hotels, lifted local restaurants and vendors, and demonstrated exactly how versatile the region's landscapes can be when they are pitched effectively as stand-ins for international settings.
Beyond that one feature, Hagin maintained a steady stream of television commercials, catalog shoots, and still photography projects that leveraged her industry contacts and her conviction that North Central Florida could serve as America's backlot. She scouted everything from horse farms and rural roads to spring runs and historic sites, attracting productions that delivered consistent if smaller-scale economic benefits without the headlines that come with major studio features. That ongoing work, combined with her one-woman drive, proved the area's potential even as funding pressures mounted, and it remains a useful reminder that dedicated, professional promotion can attract reliable production activity year after year without requiring a Hollywood-sized budget to do it.
Despite early successes and clear potential to attract more productions, the role demanded far more than any one person could sustain, particularly without consistent funding, dedicated staff, or the regional cluster advantages enjoyed by Orlando and Atlanta. City budget cuts in 2006, followed by the county commission's refusal to provide interim support in early 2007, ended the formal operation, though Hagin continued advocating for the region's filming opportunities long after the office closed.
After the commission shuttered, Hagin transitioned into independent film production, most notably co-producing the award-nominated documentary You Belong to Me, which examines the complex Ruby McCollum murder case and revisits the questions of race, sex, and justice in the 1950s South. She has also authored books available on Amazon, including Locations as Unique as Your Imagination and the true-crime title Kiss Your Mother Goodbye. With Florida's renewed film and entertainment incentives at the county level, growing producer interest in authentic locations, and evolving technology that lowers the barrier for smaller productions, it may well be time to revisit a leaner, more collaborative film promotion effort in Marion County, one that builds on Hagin's foundational work and the area's underused assets rather than starting from scratch.
But let’s not forget Dunnellon and Silver Springs.
The 2001 horror film Jeepers Creepers captured many of its most iconic scenes just outside Dunnellon in Marion County, taking full advantage of the area's rural backroads and abandoned structures to build the picture's signature dread. Principal photography ran through the late summer of 2000, with the majority of the now-famous highway driving sequences shot on the dead-straight stretch of Southwest 180th Avenue Road, known locally as Tiger Trail, northeast of Dunnellon near Rainbow Springs State Park. That long, isolated rural road delivered the perfect setting for the siblings' terrifying encounters with the Creeper's truck and accounted for roughly ninety-five percent of the film's highway action and chase moments.
Additional key filming occurred nearby on Southwest 110th Avenue, where the crew used an abandoned church, the former Saint James structure at 3602 Southwest 110th Avenue between Dunnellon and Ocala, for the unsettling scenes in which the Creeper disposes of bodies. The church burned down under unexplained circumstances after production wrapped, leaving little trace of the site today. The choice of these remote Marion County locations outside Dunnellon helped establish the film's backwoods atmosphere while delivering real economic benefits to the area through crew stays, local hires, and renewed attention to North Central Florida as a versatile filming destination.
Silver Springs in Marion County, Florida, long home to the iconic glass-bottom boats that first revealed its crystal-clear waters, served as a premier Hollywood filming location for decades thanks to its lush, jungle-like scenery and unmatched underwater clarity. Beginning as early as 1916 with the silent film The Seven Swans, the springs gained widespread fame in the 1930s and 1940s when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer shot six Tarzan films there starring Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller. Those productions used the area to stand in for African jungles, with vine-swinging scenes, underwater sequences, and exotic backdrops that made the films visually striking and drew significant national attention to North Central Florida.
Beyond the Tarzan series, Silver Springs hosted scenes from classics like Creature from the Black Lagoon and a steady run of additional features, while Elvis Presley brought star power to the broader area with his 1962 film Follow That Dream, which included shooting on Silver Springs Boulevard near Ocala. The park's unique natural features, combined with reliable weather and consistent local support, made it a go-to location for adventure and underwater filmmaking long before modern incentive programs existed. Its legacy as America's backlot endures today through the glass-bottom boat tours that still showcase the same enchanting waters audiences first saw in those historic productions.
From 2016 through about 2023, the production work that stayed in Florida concentrated in commercials, reality and unscripted television, indies, music videos, and some streaming content. The big scripted features and prestige series mostly went elsewhere. Palm Beach County still managed about two hundred forty-seven million in unscripted production spending in 2023, which is real money, but it's a fraction of what the state could have been pulling.
The last couple of years have shown a modest rebound, and that rebound is worth understanding because it explains the current map. The rebound is being driven not by the state but by the counties. Miami-Dade put together a fifty million dollar High Impact Film Fund. Miami saw something like one point six billion dollars in production spending reported in 2025. Palm Beach hit a record two hundred sixty million the same year. Orange County, the home of Orlando, rolled out a new twenty-five million dollar, five-year incentive program in late 2025 and early 2026, offering up to twenty percent rebates with strings attached for local spending, local hires, and even local hotel night requirements. Tampa Bay and St. Pete-Clearwater report steady commercial and digital media work. Statewide, Florida supports somewhere north of one hundred twenty-nine thousand entertainment-adjacent jobs, with production spending in 2025 reported around two point two billion dollars depending on whose count you trust. So Florida is not dead. Florida is just not what it was, and it's running on county-level patches instead of a statewide engine.
That uneven map gives Florida three established hubs and a few quiet players worth watching. The first hub is Miami and South Florida. Miami has always been the prestige leader for high-end, international, and culturally diverse projects. The aesthetics are unique. The crew base is solid. The global appeal is real. If you're shooting a luxury commercial, a streaming series with international flavor, or a feature that needs a city that doesn't look like every other American city, Miami is in the conversation. The second hub is Tampa Bay and the St. Pete-Clearwater area, which has been quietly growing for features, television, commercials, and digital media. Hillsborough County alone sees three hundred fifty productions a year, give or take. The cost is reasonable and the local film offices are supportive. The third hub is Palm Beach County, which has carved out a strong niche in unscripted and reality work. That's not glamorous work, but it's steady work, and steady work feeds families.
And then there's Orlando, which deserves a section of its own because it punches above what most outsiders realize.
Orlando used to be called Hollywood East, and that nickname wasn't a marketing gimmick. In the 1990s, Orlando was one of the busiest production centers in the country outside of Los Angeles and New York. The infrastructure is still there. Metro Orlando has ten or more state-of-the-art soundstages totaling significant square footage. Universal Studios Florida Production Group runs a serious operation, with legendary soundstages, backlots, production support, and offices that remain active for films, television, commercials, and large-scale events. There are other studios in the area. There are virtual production spaces, including Vū Orlando, which puts the city in the conversation for LED volume work. Disney's Hollywood Studios, which used to be an actual working production facility, shifted its emphasis more toward theme park use over the years, but the legacy and the bones of a production town are still there.
What's happened to Orlando over the last decade is what the old hands feared. The infrastructure stayed. The work shrank. The film schools kept turning out graduates, and the graduates kept leaving. Three thousand film and media program graduates a year, by some estimates, walking out into a job market that no longer has enough roles to absorb them. They go to Atlanta. They go to Los Angeles. They go to Vancouver. They go wherever the work is, because young people follow the work. And every one of those graduates is a loss to the local economy and a loss to whatever future Orlando might have built.
The new Orange County incentive program, launched in 2026, is trying to fix that. Up to twenty percent rebates. Requirements that productions spend locally, hire locally, and put crews up in local hotels. Streamlined permitting through the Orlando Film Commission. The pitch is that you can shoot here for less than you can shoot in Atlanta, you can stay in nicer hotels than you can in most production hubs, and you have an "Anywhere USA" versatility from the locations because the metro area can double for almost anything. Whether it works will depend on patience, on whether other counties follow suit, and on whether the state ever returns to the game in a serious way.
Now let me take you on a quick detour down to Manatee County, because there's a place there that teaches an important lesson about what production infrastructure can look like even when it isn't traditional film and television. The place is Feld Entertainment, and if you've ever taken a child to Monster Jam, Disney on Ice, Ringling Brothers, or one of the Marvel live-action stage shows, you've seen Feld's work without realizing it. Feld Entertainment runs a complex in Ellenton-Palmetto on something like forty-seven acres, with hundreds of thousands of square feet of total facility space and roughly one hundred thousand square feet dedicated to rehearsal, production, and event work. It's described as one of the largest facilities of its kind in the world. The company designs, builds, rehearses, and prepares its large-scale touring shows there before sending them out across the planet. The complex includes the largest monster truck facility anywhere, full-sized rehearsal studios for stage and ice productions, fabrication shops, rigging, set construction areas, and the support infrastructure to make all of it run.
Now, the Feld complex is not, despite the occasional local shorthand, a movie studio. It is purpose-built for live entertainment production. There's no public record of outside film and television companies renting it for traditional scripted work. The company's own video team produces promotional content, show trailers, behind-the-scenes footage, and livestreams for its own brands. There is an upcoming Monster Jam feature film in development with Disney and Dwayne Johnson, but that picture, when and if it shoots, will almost certainly use dedicated film sets and outside locations rather than this complex as a principal photography stage.
So why did I take you down to Manatee County? Because the existence of Feld matters even if Feld isn't a movie studio. It matters because it proves that Florida has the bones for very large entertainment production facilities. It proves that significant private investment in entertainment infrastructure happens in this state. It proves that the workforce, the suppliers, the rigging shops, the metal fabricators, the costume builders, the technicians, and the project managers exist here. They are not all gathered in one place, and they are not all aimed at film and television. But the talent base is real, and a smart county or a smart developer who wanted to draw scripted production wouldn't be building from zero. That matters when we get to Ocala. Hold the thought.
Before we get there, though, we have to take a hard look at the state that ate Hollywood's lunch, because Ocala will be tempted, like every other Florida county, to look at Georgia and say "let's just do that." Georgia is the cautionary tale on incentive policy, and the lesson is worth learning before anybody writes a check.
Georgia offers one of the most generous and uncapped film and television tax credit programs in the country. Twenty percent base, with a ten percent uplift for productions that include a Georgia promotional logo in the credits. No cap, no ceiling, no annual limit. If you qualify, you get the credit. That program is what built modern Atlanta into a production powerhouse. The studios came. The crews came. The vendors came. The economic activity came. Atlanta became the third coast and made a serious case for being the second.
Here's the part that doesn't always make the headlines. Multiple independent and state-commissioned analyses have looked at whether that program actually pays for itself in fiscal terms. The conclusions are not what the boosters tell you at the cocktail parties.
The 2020 Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts Performance Audit looked at 2016 data. The state issued six hundred sixty-seven million dollars in credits that year. The gross economic impact, generously measured, was about four point one billion dollars in output and roughly twenty-three thousand eight hundred jobs across production, tourism, and studio activity. The net impact after accounting for the alternative use of those funds, the kind of services that money could have funded if it hadn't gone to film, was about two point eight billion dollars and nine thousand one hundred thirty jobs. The fiscal return to the state was ten cents per dollar of credit issued. Add the local return and you get to twenty-one cents on the dollar. The net revenue loss was six hundred two million dollars. The cost per job was around sixty-five thousand nine hundred fifty dollars. And here's the part that ought to make every taxpayer in Georgia sit up: roughly fifty-three percent of the wages paid out went to non-residents. Out-of-state crews flew in, did the work, and flew out with paychecks Georgia subsidized.
A more recent evaluation, conducted by Georgia State University's Fiscal Research Center in 2023 on behalf of the same audit body, projected forward and assumed a high "but-for" rate, meaning ninety-two percent of the production activity in Georgia is happening because of the credit and would not be happening otherwise. Even with that generous assumption, the fiscal return came out to about nineteen cents on the dollar. The projected net fiscal losses ran from six hundred eighteen million to over one billion dollars annually in sample years. Cost per job, in some framings, exceeded one hundred sixty thousand dollars.
Academic critiques have been equally pointed. Researcher J.C. Bradbury at Kennesaw State has argued that the industry's own claimed impact, the famous nine point five billion dollar figure the trade groups like to wave around, is overstated by at least half. He puts the real impact closer to three to four billion, with sixteen to thirty-two thousand jobs, not the sixty thousand the industry numbers suggest. The broader academic consensus, going back through work at the National Bureau of Economic Research and elsewhere, is that film incentives boost filming modestly but produce limited lasting effects on employment, wages, or establishment growth. Many projects, in the technical phrase, are footloose. They go where the money is and they leave when it isn't.
Now of course the industry has its own studies that paint a much rosier picture. A 2023 Olsberg SPI report commissioned by the Georgia Screen Entertainment Coalition concluded that the program generates six dollars and thirty cents in economic output per dollar of incentive, with an eight point five billion dollar total impact and sixty thousand jobs. Note carefully: that's economic output measured generously, not net fiscal return. The industry studies measure activity. The state audits measure whether the activity pays back what the state spent to get it. Those are two very different questions, and answering one when asked the other is a magician's trick.
So here's where I have to stop and admire the situation again. Taxpayers in Georgia subsidize productions, more than half the wage payments go to out-of-state workers, and the program returns somewhere between ten and twenty cents on the dollar to the state treasury. And we're told this is an investment. Now you and I both know what an investment is. An investment is when you put money in and you get more money out. What Georgia has is not an investment. What Georgia has is a payment to convince an industry to set up shop, paid largely to people who don't live there. There's a perfectly defensible argument for doing that, by the way. Maybe the cultural cluster is worth it. Maybe the long-term workforce development is worth it. Maybe the brand value of being a production state is worth it. But let's at least call the dog by its right name. It's a subsidy with a cultural and economic policy rationale, not a business deal that pays back. And anyone in Florida, including in Ocala, who wants to chase Georgia's model better understand exactly what they'd be chasing
So that's the state of the industry, the state of California, the state of Florida, and the state of the leading competitor. Now let's talk about the wave that's reshaping everything, because the wave is the part that creates the opening Ocala could potentially walk through.
The industry is decentralizing, and it's getting lean in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. Three forces are driving the change, and all three matter for the Ocala question.
The first force is virtual production. If you haven't seen it in operation, picture a curved wall of high-resolution LED panels, sometimes wrapping all the way around a set, displaying environments rendered in real time by software like Unreal Engine. The actors stand in front of it. The cameras shoot it. And the background, instead of being a green screen replaced in post-production, is a fully realized world that responds to the camera's movement and lighting. The result looks more natural, costs less to fix in post, and lets you shoot scenes you'd otherwise have to travel to. The Mandalorian on Disney's streaming service was the high-profile pioneer. Now the technology is everywhere, and the market is projected to grow to twelve billion dollars or more by the early 2030s. A producer who needs a Tuscan villa, a Manhattan rooftop, a Tatooine sunset, and a 1940s noir alley doesn't need four locations. He needs a soundstage with an LED volume.
The second force is artificial intelligence. AI is moving from experimental tool to core production tool. Script analysis, pre-visualization, visual effects, generation of background characters and filler footage, editing assistance, music composition, even full digital environments. Lower-budget productions are leaping ahead because AI lets a small team accomplish what used to require a small army. The labor implications are real and the guilds are negotiating around them, but the trend is set. AI-assisted, not AI-replacing, content is what 2026 looks like, and that trend is going one direction.
The third force is the cloud. Post-production used to require a building full of expensive workstations and editors who lived within driving distance. Now the dailies upload to the cloud, the editor in Vancouver pulls them down, the colorist in London pulls them down, the visual effects team in Mumbai pulls them down, the composer in Nashville scores against them, and the producer in Atlanta reviews them on a tablet. The work is distributed. The talent is global. The center of gravity, if there is one, is wherever the storage is.
Stack those three forces on top of the cost pressures we already talked about and you get a different industry. Smaller budgets. Fewer of the big swing-for-the-fences pictures. More mid-budget and indie work. Targeted, short-term physical shoots for the scenes that need to be real, followed by the bulk of the work being done digitally on stages and in cloud workflows. Productions can do a week of location work somewhere beautiful, then a week of LED volume work on a stage somewhere cost-effective, then six months of post-production handled by teams scattered across three continents. The lot in Burbank is not necessary in the way it used to be. The cluster is not necessary in the way it used to be. The lean producer follows the math, and the math says you don't need to be in Hollywood.
That brings us to the matter of proximity, and I want to spend a moment on this because it's where a lot of the conventional wisdom is getting out of date. For a hundred years, the argument for being in Los Angeles was that everybody else was in Los Angeles. The agents were there. The casting directors were there. The financiers were there. The rewrite meetings were there. You couldn't run a real production from somewhere else because the deal flow lived in the city and you had to be in the city to be in the deal flow. There was real truth to that.
A lot of that truth has died quietly over the last few years. Casting auditions are recorded and submitted online. Pitch meetings happen on video calls. Production deals close over email and DocuSign. The agent in Beverly Hills and the agent's client in Florida can do business together without either of them ever boarding a plane. Even physical meetings, the kind that still happen and probably always will, can be done with a single trip rather than a permanent residence. None of that means proximity stopped mattering entirely. It means proximity matters in a different way. You don't need to live next door anymore. You need to be a flight away. You need to be reachable. You need to be on the right time zones for the call. And you need bandwidth, because in a cloud-based industry, your internet connection is your front door.
Now we have done enough riding around the country to come back home. Let me take you back to that drive north out of Orlando, because everything we've talked about, the cost pressures driving production out of California, the rise of decentralized hubs, the rebuilding of Florida from the county level up, the rise of virtual production, the death of proximity as it used to be defined, all of it lands at a question about whether the heart of Florida is paying attention.
Ocala sits roughly an hour north of Orlando, which puts it about an hour and ten minutes from the Universal soundstages, an hour and a half from the Vū Orlando virtual production facility, and well within driving range of every piece of existing infrastructure Central Florida has to offer. The Ocala International Airport is right there, capable of handling private aviation, which is how a lot of production talent moves around. Interstate 75 runs right through the metro, which means trucks and equipment can move in and out of the area as easily as they move anywhere in the state. State Road 40 cuts east-west, connecting the area to Daytona and the coast on one side and to Inverness and the Gulf side on the other. The geography is good.
The World Equestrian Center is the headline attraction now, and it's worth understanding what that facility represents. It's not just a horse show venue. It's a destination resort, a hotel and dining complex, a luxury accommodation hub, and an event facility that brings significant national and international traffic to Ocala. When you have a place that can host a major equestrian event, you have a place that can house a production. The hotel rooms, the restaurants, the meeting spaces, the catering operations, the security infrastructure, the staging areas, all of it is already there. You don't have to build it. You don't have to imagine it. You can drive over and see it.
The horse farms themselves are the unsung asset. White board fences. Live oaks dripping Spanish moss. Rolling pastures. Centuries-old barns. Thoroughbreds running in the morning light. There is no place in California, no place in Georgia, no place in Atlanta, no place in Los Angeles that looks like Ocala horse country. It is its own visual signature, and visual signatures are exactly what production companies pay to find. Period pieces. Romantic dramas. Sports films. Documentary work. Equestrian content. Anything that needs to look established and rooted and traditional. Ocala is already that, and it is that without anyone needing to dress a set.
The springs are another asset most people outside the region don't fully appreciate. Silver Springs. Rainbow Springs. Juniper Springs. Salt Springs. Crystal-clear water, jungle vegetation, the kind of underwater photography opportunity that costs a small fortune to fake. The original Tarzan films and early underwater epics used these springs precisely because no soundstage could replicate what nature had already built. They're still here, still photogenic, and still underused as a film resource.
And then there are the warehouses. If you've driven Interstate 75 anywhere through the Marion County stretch in the last five years, you've seen the construction. Distribution centers are going up. Logistics facilities are going up. Auto parts warehouses, e-commerce fulfillment, manufacturing space. The land is available. The development model is proven. The local construction firms know how to build big, simple, flexible, climate-controlled buildings to spec. That same construction expertise, redirected with a different floor plan and a different ceiling height, could just as easily build soundstages. A soundstage is essentially a very tall warehouse with sound isolation, high-amperage power, a grid system, and air conditioning. The building itself is not exotic. The expertise to build it exists locally. The land exists locally. The financing structures used for distribution warehouses could be adapted for production space.
And alongside all of this, the area has been quietly building professional infrastructure for decades. The Ocala metro has been growing steadily since the Florida boom of the 1980s. Private investment has been moving in. Independent professional offices, financial services firms, medical specialists, legal practices, technology and communications professionals, all have been planting flags in this region year over year. The Truesdell professional building out at 200 NW 52nd Avenue, owned and operated by the firm rather than rented from a landlord, is one small example of the kind of permanent local investment that signals confidence in a region. Multiply that pattern across the metro, in different industries, and you get a sense of the underlying momentum that has been building here for some time. People with means and judgment have been quietly betting on this part of Florida.
So what does Ocala have that other places don't? It has land at a cost that no California county and no metro Atlanta county can match. It has a unique visual aesthetic in the horse farms and the springs that can't be duplicated elsewhere. It has existing infrastructure in the World Equestrian Center and the airport and the interstate that takes the edge off site selection. It has a construction industry already building big flexible buildings for other purposes that could be redirected to production. It has proximity to the existing Orlando production cluster without having Orlando's costs. It has a cost of living that allows below-the-line workers to actually afford to live where they work, which is the single biggest structural failure of the Los Angeles model. And it has a quality of life, the kind of life with horses, springs, forests, and small-town pace, that a certain kind of creative person actively seeks out.
What it doesn't have, and we have to be honest about this, is a critical mass of existing production-trained workforce, a sitting incentive program, a national reputation as a production destination, or the kind of cluster effect that draws projects in without anybody having to recruit them. Building all of that would take work and time and, more than anything else, vision.
Here's what would have to happen if forward-thinking minds in this region prevailed. First, the county would need to look at what Orange County did with its twenty-five million dollar, five-year incentive program and ask whether something similar, sized appropriately for Marion County, could be modeled here. The Georgia lesson tells us not to write an uncapped check that subsidizes mostly out-of-state workers. The Orange County model is more disciplined, with requirements for local spending, local hires, and local hotel nights. Done right, a county program could be the catalyst that turns existing assets into actual production activity. Done wrong, it becomes the kind of subsidy program we already examined in Georgia that costs the local treasury and rewards nobody who lives nearby.
Second, the construction community would need to take a serious look at flexible, multi-use buildings that could function as soundstages, virtual production volumes, set construction shops, and prop and costume storage. Build them on speculation if necessary, the way distribution warehouses are sometimes built on speculation, and lease them to productions on flexible terms. The land is available. The construction expertise is available. The capital, given the right combination of incentives and demand signals, can be assembled.
Third, the local colleges and the technical schools would need to start building or expanding programs in the trades that production needs. Set construction, lighting, sound, camera operation, post-production, virtual production technicians, drone operators, equipment maintenance. Not every job in this industry requires a four-year film degree. Many of the most important jobs are craft jobs that pay well and don't require a degree at all. A regional workforce pipeline, tied to actual demand, would tell young people from Ocala and the surrounding counties that they don't have to leave to work in this industry.
Fourth, the permit process would need to be streamlined and made predictable. The Orlando Film Commission already does this well. Marion County could study what they do and replicate or improve on it. A producer needs to know in advance what the permit costs, what the timeline is, and what the restrictions are. Predictability is worth as much as any incentive.
Fifth, the bandwidth and connectivity infrastructure needs to be production-grade. Symmetrical high-speed internet, redundancy, fiber to the major facilities. In a cloud-based industry, your data link is your loading dock. Many distribution centers along the I-75 corridor have already required these upgrades for their own logistics operations. Extending that capability to entertainment production facilities would be incremental rather than transformative.
Sixth, and perhaps most importantly, the region would need a marketing voice. Somebody, or some small coordinated group of somebodies, would need to tell the story. Not flashy. Not gimmicky. Just clear and honest. Here's what we have, here's what it costs, here's how to get a permit, here's where to stay, here's who to hire, here's the visual range available within an hour's drive. The producers and location scouts who would respond to that story are not looking to be impressed. They're looking to be informed.
Now let me give you the honest caveats, because no real conversation about this is worth your time if I just paint a rosy picture and call it a forecast. Florida still lacks a competitive statewide incentive program. Until or unless that changes, every Florida county is fighting Georgia, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Canada with one hand tied behind its back. County incentives can help, and they are helping, but they cannot match a state-level commitment. Georgia, Atlanta especially, has built a cluster that took fifteen years to develop, and clusters are sticky. Talent is there, vendors are there, the muscle memory of how to make television in Georgia is there. Ocala starting now is starting from a different place than Atlanta started fifteen years ago, partly because the industry itself is different now and partly because the competition is more sophisticated.
The virtual production revolution may also cut both ways. The same trends that let production happen in lower-cost regions like Ocala also let it happen in even lower-cost regions, including overseas. There is no reason a streaming series filmed on an LED volume couldn't be done in Eastern Europe as easily as in Florida. Cost competition doesn't stop at the state line or the national border. And the lean economy means that even when productions come, they may bring fewer crew, spend fewer days, and leave behind less economic activity than the old big-cluster productions did.
Talent doesn't appear by waving a wand. It takes years to develop a serious below-the-line workforce. The Orlando talent drain we already discussed shows what happens when the work doesn't keep pace with the graduates. Ocala doesn't have its own film school producing three thousand graduates a year, which is both a problem and not a problem. The problem is that the workforce has to come from somewhere. The not-a-problem is that Ocala could potentially absorb some of that Orlando graduate flow, the way a younger college town can absorb the energy a bigger town squanders, if the jobs are here for them to fill.
And patience, the kind of patience that builds something over a decade rather than a quarter, is in short supply in most political environments. The forward-thinking minds we've been talking about would need to be the kind of minds that can hold a vision through multiple election cycles, through downturns and slow years and noisy critics. That kind of mind exists, but it doesn't exist in unlimited supply.
So we come back to where we started. The horses are still grazing in the morning light. The World Equestrian Center is still drawing visitors from around the world. The warehouses along Interstate 75 are still going up. The springs are still running clear. The roads are still open. The land is still affordable. The question is still on the table.
Could the Ocala metropolitan area, the heart of Florida north of Orlando, be poised for a film, television, and video production boom? I told you at the beginning I wasn't going to tell you yes and I wasn't going to tell you no. After everything we've ridden through together, the most honest answer is this. The conditions for a boom are present in a way they have not been before. The industry is decentralizing. The proximity argument that locked everything into Los Angeles for a century has lost most of its force. The technology is making production leaner and more portable. Florida's existing hubs are showing what county-level commitment can do. The construction expertise, the land, the infrastructure, the visual assets, and the cost advantages are all in place here. What is not yet in place is the coordinated decision to build on that foundation.
That brings us, as promised, back to Rob Lowe and Ireland. A producer who finds it cheaper to fly his host, his contestants, his crew, and his cameras across the Atlantic Ocean than to shoot the same show twenty miles from his own office is not making an emotional decision. He's not anti-California. He's not anti-Hollywood. He's running a business, and the numbers told him exactly what to do. That same producer, looking at the map a few years from now, could just as easily look at Ocala. The numbers will tell him. The visuals will tell him. The infrastructure will tell him. The question is whether, when he looks, the welcome mat will be out, the permit will be ready, the soundstage will be standing, and the workforce will be in place to do the work.
The cameras will keep rolling. The cameras will roll somewhere. They've already left Hollywood in numbers nobody imagined a decade ago. They're rolling in Georgia, in New Mexico, in Vancouver, in Dublin, and on LED volumes in places nobody has heard of yet. They will roll, in the next decade, in places that are paying attention, in places that have prepared, and in places that have made it easy for the people who pay for cameras to choose them.
Whether one of those places is the heart of Florida, with the horses in the pasture and the springs running clear and the warehouses rising along the interstate, is not a question for the camera operators or the producers or the studios. It's a question for the people who live here, who work here, who lead here, and who decide whether the next chapter of this region is one they'll write deliberately or one they'll let happen to them. The same patience and discipline and vision that built the equestrian center, that built the medical complex, that built the distribution network, that built the family offices and the professional buildings and the entire quiet engine of growth that has been running here since the eighties, that same patience and discipline and vision is exactly what would be required.
And so the question, the one we started with up on Interstate 75 looking out over the horse farms and the rising warehouses, isn't really a question about the industry at all. The industry will do what industries do. They will follow the math. They will follow the talent. They will follow the welcome mat.
The real question is whether the heart of Florida intends to roll one out. The cameras will roll somewhere. The only question is whether they roll here.
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If you've ever driven north out of Orlando on Interstate 75, somewhere around the time the suburbs thin out and the land starts to roll, you begin to notice that you've crossed into a different Florida. The flat coastal Florida of postcards is behind you. The Florida in front of you has hills, real hills by Florida standards, with white-board fences running along the ridges and thoroughbreds grazing in pastures that look like somebody airlifted them out of Kentucky. The exits start carrying horse names. The road signs point to the World Equestrian Center, a place so large and so deliberate that it changed the conversation about what Ocala is and what Ocala could become. And out beyond those horse farms, along the commerce corridors, you'll see something else. Warehouses. Big ones. New ones. Steel rising on what used to be pine flats and pasture. The trucks moving in and out tell you that the rest of the world has figured out something the locals have known for a while: this part of Florida is positioned at the intersection of just about everywhere.
Hold that picture in your mind, because we have a question to chew on for the next little while. Could the Ocala metropolitan area, the heart of Florida and the country just north of Orlando, be poised for a film, television, and video production boom? Could the same combination of land, infrastructure, beauty, and cost advantage that's drawn equestrian sport, retirees, distribution centers, and breeders also draw the cameras? I'm not going to tell you yes and I'm not going to tell you no. The honest answer is more interesting than either. But by the time we ride out of this together, you'll have a clearer picture of where the industry is, where Florida is, what Ocala has, and what would have to happen if the forward-thinking minds in this region decided that the next chapter was going to be theirs to write.
Now, before we get to Ocala, we have to take an honest look at where the picture business actually stands. Because if we don't understand what's happening to Hollywood and why, we'll either oversell what's possible here or undersell it. Both are mistakes.
There's a story going around out west that just about tells the whole tale. A television producer was putting together a game show. He had Rob Lowe lined up to host. He had contestants ready to play. And when he set the cost of filming in Los Angeles next to the cost of flying the whole production to Ireland, Ireland won. Not by a nickel either. By enough to make the decision easy. So they packed up Rob Lowe, packed up the contestants, packed up the cameras, and off they went across the Atlantic. That one decision, by one producer, on one show, captures more about the modern entertainment business than a thousand pages of trade press.
For a hundred years, Hollywood was the place. If you wanted to make a picture, you came to Los Angeles. The talent lived there. The crews lived there. The stages were there. The vendors were there. You could walk down a street in Burbank and find every craftsman, every camera operator, every costume designer you needed within a five-mile radius. It was the kind of cluster that took a century to build and nobody figured could ever come apart. Well, friend, it's coming apart.
The numbers tell the story plain enough. Last year, on-location shoot days in the greater Los Angeles area dropped to about nineteen thousand seven hundred. That's a sixteen percent fall from the year before and the lowest count in recent memory if you set aside the pandemic shutdown. The first quarter of last year saw a twenty-two percent drop year over year, with television down better than thirty percent and feature films down nearly twenty-nine. There's been no annual increase since 2021. Early 2026 did show a small bump, about ten percent better quarter over quarter, with features leading the way, but the overall level still sits below where it stood in better years. Soundstages that used to run at near full occupancy are sitting at about sixty-three percent. Tens of thousands of jobs have evaporated. Forty-two thousand in entertainment-related sectors in Los Angeles County alone over a couple of years, with the below-the-line folks taking the worst of it. Those are the grips, the gaffers, the prop masters, the caterers, the people who actually build the magic.
An old rancher I knew used to say that when the water dries up, you find out pretty quick which cattle were grazing for love and which were grazing for grass. Hollywood is finding out which productions were there for the talent and the legacy and which were there because that's just where the trail ended. Turns out a lot of them were the second kind.
So why is this happening? It isn't because the talent moved. It isn't because the audiences disappeared. It's because doing business in California got too expensive to pencil out. Start with labor. Wages are high, benefits are high, payroll burdens run anywhere from twenty-eight to thirty-four percent. Workers' compensation costs are eye-watering. Union work rules add expense at every turn. None of this is to say workers don't deserve fair pay. They do, and they earned it. But when you stack it all up, Los Angeles becomes a number that simply will not compete with the numbers a producer can get in Georgia, New Mexico, New York, or overseas.
Then add the real estate. Housing in Los Angeles is a punchline at this point. The crews who used to live thirty minutes from the studio now live three hours away or have left the state entirely. The vendors are getting squeezed by the same costs. The whole ecosystem that made Hollywood Hollywood is being priced out of Hollywood. Then there's the permitting and the regulation. Layer upon layer of process. Sign here, wait here, pay here, do it again.
Here's where I have to stop and admire the situation for a moment. California, the state that prides itself on being the cultural capital of the world, has spent decades writing rules, taxes, and regulations that make it economically irrational to produce culture inside its own borders. Then it acts surprised when the cameras leave. That takes a certain kind of accomplishment. You almost have to applaud it.
To be fair, the state has finally noticed. Last year they expanded the Film and Television Tax Credit Program to seven hundred and fifty million dollars a year. They call it Program 4.0, which is what folks call something when they've already tried three other versions of it. They raised the base credit to thirty-five percent and stretched it as high as forty-five with bonuses. They made the credits more refundable. They broadened who could qualify. FilmLA says there are early signs of recovery. That's good. That's something. But uncapped programs in other states and overseas still beat what California is offering, and tax credits cannot fix the underlying problem. The underlying problem is that everything else in California is too expensive. Some of the analysts are now warning that parts of the Hollywood ecosystem could end up looking like Detroit looked in the 1980s. Detroit didn't lose the automobile. It lost the assumption that everything had to be built in Detroit. Hollywood is losing the assumption that everything has to be shot in Hollywood. Once that assumption is gone, you don't get it back easily.
That's where Hollywood sits. Now let's swing east, because Florida has a story of its own, and you can't talk about Ocala's potential without first understanding what happened to the state it sits in.
Florida used to be a serious player in this business. In the middle of the last decade, the state ranked third nationally on some production metrics, behind only California and New York. The statewide film and entertainment incentive program supported billions of dollars in production spending and tens of thousands of jobs. Crews built careers here. Vendors built businesses here. Universal in Orlando wasn't just a theme park, it was a working production lot, and Disney's Hollywood Studios was once exactly what its name said, an actual working studio. The state was open for business and the cameras knew it.
Then in 2016, the Florida legislature let the statewide incentive program expire. Different people will tell you different things about why. Some will say the program had structural problems and didn't deliver. Some will say short-term political winds blew the wrong way. Some will say nobody fought hard enough to save it. The reasons don't matter as much as the result. The result was a cliff. Producers do not enjoy uncertainty. Producers love a state that says "come on in, here's the math, here's the timeline, here's the rebate." Take that away, and they go somewhere else. They went to Georgia. They went to Louisiana. They went to North Carolina. They went to New Mexico. They went overseas. And Florida watched its production economy thin out like a herd in a dry summer. Estimates suggest the state forfeited over two billion dollars in production spending in the years that followed.
Marion County, Florida once had a serious shot at building a film economy, and much of the credit belongs to Jude Hagin, who served as the dedicated film commissioner for Ocala and Marion County for more than a decade. Operating essentially as a one-woman powerhouse through the Film Commission of Real Florida, Incorporated, she scouted locations, networked with producers, and helped bring ancillary projects, Marion County's most visible Hollywood moment came not from filming Wild Hogs, which was shot almost entirely in New Mexico, but from hosting the movie's hometown premiere at the Marion Theatre in March 2007, anchored by Ocala-area resident John Travolta of nearby Jumbolair Aviation Estates. That event, complete with red carpet, fan meet-and-greets, and a signed motorcycle auction for local causes, illustrated the kind of regional spotlight Ocala can capture when a major star calls it home and somebody on the ground is actively working to leverage the connection.
The Celestine Prophecy, and a steady stream of commercials to the area, Hagin leveraged her contacts and her passion for showcasing North Central Florida as America's backlot. The Celestine Prophecy brought significant production activity to Marion County in 2004 when the Film Commission of Real Florida successfully convinced the filmmakers that Rainbow Springs State Park could double for the jungles of Peru. Principal Ocala-area filming took place at an abandoned rock quarry north of the city, where crews constructed elaborate sets including a church, a jail, a roadblock, and ruins, with interior scenes shot at the local Hilton and a nearby warehouse. Cast and crew stayed in area hotels, lifted local restaurants and vendors, and demonstrated exactly how versatile the region's landscapes can be when they are pitched effectively as stand-ins for international settings.
Beyond that one feature, Hagin maintained a steady stream of television commercials, catalog shoots, and still photography projects that leveraged her industry contacts and her conviction that North Central Florida could serve as America's backlot. She scouted everything from horse farms and rural roads to spring runs and historic sites, attracting productions that delivered consistent if smaller-scale economic benefits without the headlines that come with major studio features. That ongoing work, combined with her one-woman drive, proved the area's potential even as funding pressures mounted, and it remains a useful reminder that dedicated, professional promotion can attract reliable production activity year after year without requiring a Hollywood-sized budget to do it.
Despite early successes and clear potential to attract more productions, the role demanded far more than any one person could sustain, particularly without consistent funding, dedicated staff, or the regional cluster advantages enjoyed by Orlando and Atlanta. City budget cuts in 2006, followed by the county commission's refusal to provide interim support in early 2007, ended the formal operation, though Hagin continued advocating for the region's filming opportunities long after the office closed.
After the commission shuttered, Hagin transitioned into independent film production, most notably co-producing the award-nominated documentary You Belong to Me, which examines the complex Ruby McCollum murder case and revisits the questions of race, sex, and justice in the 1950s South. She has also authored books available on Amazon, including Locations as Unique as Your Imagination and the true-crime title Kiss Your Mother Goodbye. With Florida's renewed film and entertainment incentives at the county level, growing producer interest in authentic locations, and evolving technology that lowers the barrier for smaller productions, it may well be time to revisit a leaner, more collaborative film promotion effort in Marion County, one that builds on Hagin's foundational work and the area's underused assets rather than starting from scratch.
But let’s not forget Dunnellon and Silver Springs.
The 2001 horror film Jeepers Creepers captured many of its most iconic scenes just outside Dunnellon in Marion County, taking full advantage of the area's rural backroads and abandoned structures to build the picture's signature dread. Principal photography ran through the late summer of 2000, with the majority of the now-famous highway driving sequences shot on the dead-straight stretch of Southwest 180th Avenue Road, known locally as Tiger Trail, northeast of Dunnellon near Rainbow Springs State Park. That long, isolated rural road delivered the perfect setting for the siblings' terrifying encounters with the Creeper's truck and accounted for roughly ninety-five percent of the film's highway action and chase moments.
Additional key filming occurred nearby on Southwest 110th Avenue, where the crew used an abandoned church, the former Saint James structure at 3602 Southwest 110th Avenue between Dunnellon and Ocala, for the unsettling scenes in which the Creeper disposes of bodies. The church burned down under unexplained circumstances after production wrapped, leaving little trace of the site today. The choice of these remote Marion County locations outside Dunnellon helped establish the film's backwoods atmosphere while delivering real economic benefits to the area through crew stays, local hires, and renewed attention to North Central Florida as a versatile filming destination.
Silver Springs in Marion County, Florida, long home to the iconic glass-bottom boats that first revealed its crystal-clear waters, served as a premier Hollywood filming location for decades thanks to its lush, jungle-like scenery and unmatched underwater clarity. Beginning as early as 1916 with the silent film The Seven Swans, the springs gained widespread fame in the 1930s and 1940s when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer shot six Tarzan films there starring Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller. Those productions used the area to stand in for African jungles, with vine-swinging scenes, underwater sequences, and exotic backdrops that made the films visually striking and drew significant national attention to North Central Florida.
Beyond the Tarzan series, Silver Springs hosted scenes from classics like Creature from the Black Lagoon and a steady run of additional features, while Elvis Presley brought star power to the broader area with his 1962 film Follow That Dream, which included shooting on Silver Springs Boulevard near Ocala. The park's unique natural features, combined with reliable weather and consistent local support, made it a go-to location for adventure and underwater filmmaking long before modern incentive programs existed. Its legacy as America's backlot endures today through the glass-bottom boat tours that still showcase the same enchanting waters audiences first saw in those historic productions.
From 2016 through about 2023, the production work that stayed in Florida concentrated in commercials, reality and unscripted television, indies, music videos, and some streaming content. The big scripted features and prestige series mostly went elsewhere. Palm Beach County still managed about two hundred forty-seven million in unscripted production spending in 2023, which is real money, but it's a fraction of what the state could have been pulling.
The last couple of years have shown a modest rebound, and that rebound is worth understanding because it explains the current map. The rebound is being driven not by the state but by the counties. Miami-Dade put together a fifty million dollar High Impact Film Fund. Miami saw something like one point six billion dollars in production spending reported in 2025. Palm Beach hit a record two hundred sixty million the same year. Orange County, the home of Orlando, rolled out a new twenty-five million dollar, five-year incentive program in late 2025 and early 2026, offering up to twenty percent rebates with strings attached for local spending, local hires, and even local hotel night requirements. Tampa Bay and St. Pete-Clearwater report steady commercial and digital media work. Statewide, Florida supports somewhere north of one hundred twenty-nine thousand entertainment-adjacent jobs, with production spending in 2025 reported around two point two billion dollars depending on whose count you trust. So Florida is not dead. Florida is just not what it was, and it's running on county-level patches instead of a statewide engine.
That uneven map gives Florida three established hubs and a few quiet players worth watching. The first hub is Miami and South Florida. Miami has always been the prestige leader for high-end, international, and culturally diverse projects. The aesthetics are unique. The crew base is solid. The global appeal is real. If you're shooting a luxury commercial, a streaming series with international flavor, or a feature that needs a city that doesn't look like every other American city, Miami is in the conversation. The second hub is Tampa Bay and the St. Pete-Clearwater area, which has been quietly growing for features, television, commercials, and digital media. Hillsborough County alone sees three hundred fifty productions a year, give or take. The cost is reasonable and the local film offices are supportive. The third hub is Palm Beach County, which has carved out a strong niche in unscripted and reality work. That's not glamorous work, but it's steady work, and steady work feeds families.
And then there's Orlando, which deserves a section of its own because it punches above what most outsiders realize.
Orlando used to be called Hollywood East, and that nickname wasn't a marketing gimmick. In the 1990s, Orlando was one of the busiest production centers in the country outside of Los Angeles and New York. The infrastructure is still there. Metro Orlando has ten or more state-of-the-art soundstages totaling significant square footage. Universal Studios Florida Production Group runs a serious operation, with legendary soundstages, backlots, production support, and offices that remain active for films, television, commercials, and large-scale events. There are other studios in the area. There are virtual production spaces, including Vū Orlando, which puts the city in the conversation for LED volume work. Disney's Hollywood Studios, which used to be an actual working production facility, shifted its emphasis more toward theme park use over the years, but the legacy and the bones of a production town are still there.
What's happened to Orlando over the last decade is what the old hands feared. The infrastructure stayed. The work shrank. The film schools kept turning out graduates, and the graduates kept leaving. Three thousand film and media program graduates a year, by some estimates, walking out into a job market that no longer has enough roles to absorb them. They go to Atlanta. They go to Los Angeles. They go to Vancouver. They go wherever the work is, because young people follow the work. And every one of those graduates is a loss to the local economy and a loss to whatever future Orlando might have built.
The new Orange County incentive program, launched in 2026, is trying to fix that. Up to twenty percent rebates. Requirements that productions spend locally, hire locally, and put crews up in local hotels. Streamlined permitting through the Orlando Film Commission. The pitch is that you can shoot here for less than you can shoot in Atlanta, you can stay in nicer hotels than you can in most production hubs, and you have an "Anywhere USA" versatility from the locations because the metro area can double for almost anything. Whether it works will depend on patience, on whether other counties follow suit, and on whether the state ever returns to the game in a serious way.
Now let me take you on a quick detour down to Manatee County, because there's a place there that teaches an important lesson about what production infrastructure can look like even when it isn't traditional film and television. The place is Feld Entertainment, and if you've ever taken a child to Monster Jam, Disney on Ice, Ringling Brothers, or one of the Marvel live-action stage shows, you've seen Feld's work without realizing it. Feld Entertainment runs a complex in Ellenton-Palmetto on something like forty-seven acres, with hundreds of thousands of square feet of total facility space and roughly one hundred thousand square feet dedicated to rehearsal, production, and event work. It's described as one of the largest facilities of its kind in the world. The company designs, builds, rehearses, and prepares its large-scale touring shows there before sending them out across the planet. The complex includes the largest monster truck facility anywhere, full-sized rehearsal studios for stage and ice productions, fabrication shops, rigging, set construction areas, and the support infrastructure to make all of it run.
Now, the Feld complex is not, despite the occasional local shorthand, a movie studio. It is purpose-built for live entertainment production. There's no public record of outside film and television companies renting it for traditional scripted work. The company's own video team produces promotional content, show trailers, behind-the-scenes footage, and livestreams for its own brands. There is an upcoming Monster Jam feature film in development with Disney and Dwayne Johnson, but that picture, when and if it shoots, will almost certainly use dedicated film sets and outside locations rather than this complex as a principal photography stage.
So why did I take you down to Manatee County? Because the existence of Feld matters even if Feld isn't a movie studio. It matters because it proves that Florida has the bones for very large entertainment production facilities. It proves that significant private investment in entertainment infrastructure happens in this state. It proves that the workforce, the suppliers, the rigging shops, the metal fabricators, the costume builders, the technicians, and the project managers exist here. They are not all gathered in one place, and they are not all aimed at film and television. But the talent base is real, and a smart county or a smart developer who wanted to draw scripted production wouldn't be building from zero. That matters when we get to Ocala. Hold the thought.
Before we get there, though, we have to take a hard look at the state that ate Hollywood's lunch, because Ocala will be tempted, like every other Florida county, to look at Georgia and say "let's just do that." Georgia is the cautionary tale on incentive policy, and the lesson is worth learning before anybody writes a check.
Georgia offers one of the most generous and uncapped film and television tax credit programs in the country. Twenty percent base, with a ten percent uplift for productions that include a Georgia promotional logo in the credits. No cap, no ceiling, no annual limit. If you qualify, you get the credit. That program is what built modern Atlanta into a production powerhouse. The studios came. The crews came. The vendors came. The economic activity came. Atlanta became the third coast and made a serious case for being the second.
Here's the part that doesn't always make the headlines. Multiple independent and state-commissioned analyses have looked at whether that program actually pays for itself in fiscal terms. The conclusions are not what the boosters tell you at the cocktail parties.
The 2020 Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts Performance Audit looked at 2016 data. The state issued six hundred sixty-seven million dollars in credits that year. The gross economic impact, generously measured, was about four point one billion dollars in output and roughly twenty-three thousand eight hundred jobs across production, tourism, and studio activity. The net impact after accounting for the alternative use of those funds, the kind of services that money could have funded if it hadn't gone to film, was about two point eight billion dollars and nine thousand one hundred thirty jobs. The fiscal return to the state was ten cents per dollar of credit issued. Add the local return and you get to twenty-one cents on the dollar. The net revenue loss was six hundred two million dollars. The cost per job was around sixty-five thousand nine hundred fifty dollars. And here's the part that ought to make every taxpayer in Georgia sit up: roughly fifty-three percent of the wages paid out went to non-residents. Out-of-state crews flew in, did the work, and flew out with paychecks Georgia subsidized.
A more recent evaluation, conducted by Georgia State University's Fiscal Research Center in 2023 on behalf of the same audit body, projected forward and assumed a high "but-for" rate, meaning ninety-two percent of the production activity in Georgia is happening because of the credit and would not be happening otherwise. Even with that generous assumption, the fiscal return came out to about nineteen cents on the dollar. The projected net fiscal losses ran from six hundred eighteen million to over one billion dollars annually in sample years. Cost per job, in some framings, exceeded one hundred sixty thousand dollars.
Academic critiques have been equally pointed. Researcher J.C. Bradbury at Kennesaw State has argued that the industry's own claimed impact, the famous nine point five billion dollar figure the trade groups like to wave around, is overstated by at least half. He puts the real impact closer to three to four billion, with sixteen to thirty-two thousand jobs, not the sixty thousand the industry numbers suggest. The broader academic consensus, going back through work at the National Bureau of Economic Research and elsewhere, is that film incentives boost filming modestly but produce limited lasting effects on employment, wages, or establishment growth. Many projects, in the technical phrase, are footloose. They go where the money is and they leave when it isn't.
Now of course the industry has its own studies that paint a much rosier picture. A 2023 Olsberg SPI report commissioned by the Georgia Screen Entertainment Coalition concluded that the program generates six dollars and thirty cents in economic output per dollar of incentive, with an eight point five billion dollar total impact and sixty thousand jobs. Note carefully: that's economic output measured generously, not net fiscal return. The industry studies measure activity. The state audits measure whether the activity pays back what the state spent to get it. Those are two very different questions, and answering one when asked the other is a magician's trick.
So here's where I have to stop and admire the situation again. Taxpayers in Georgia subsidize productions, more than half the wage payments go to out-of-state workers, and the program returns somewhere between ten and twenty cents on the dollar to the state treasury. And we're told this is an investment. Now you and I both know what an investment is. An investment is when you put money in and you get more money out. What Georgia has is not an investment. What Georgia has is a payment to convince an industry to set up shop, paid largely to people who don't live there. There's a perfectly defensible argument for doing that, by the way. Maybe the cultural cluster is worth it. Maybe the long-term workforce development is worth it. Maybe the brand value of being a production state is worth it. But let's at least call the dog by its right name. It's a subsidy with a cultural and economic policy rationale, not a business deal that pays back. And anyone in Florida, including in Ocala, who wants to chase Georgia's model better understand exactly what they'd be chasing
So that's the state of the industry, the state of California, the state of Florida, and the state of the leading competitor. Now let's talk about the wave that's reshaping everything, because the wave is the part that creates the opening Ocala could potentially walk through.
The industry is decentralizing, and it's getting lean in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. Three forces are driving the change, and all three matter for the Ocala question.
The first force is virtual production. If you haven't seen it in operation, picture a curved wall of high-resolution LED panels, sometimes wrapping all the way around a set, displaying environments rendered in real time by software like Unreal Engine. The actors stand in front of it. The cameras shoot it. And the background, instead of being a green screen replaced in post-production, is a fully realized world that responds to the camera's movement and lighting. The result looks more natural, costs less to fix in post, and lets you shoot scenes you'd otherwise have to travel to. The Mandalorian on Disney's streaming service was the high-profile pioneer. Now the technology is everywhere, and the market is projected to grow to twelve billion dollars or more by the early 2030s. A producer who needs a Tuscan villa, a Manhattan rooftop, a Tatooine sunset, and a 1940s noir alley doesn't need four locations. He needs a soundstage with an LED volume.
The second force is artificial intelligence. AI is moving from experimental tool to core production tool. Script analysis, pre-visualization, visual effects, generation of background characters and filler footage, editing assistance, music composition, even full digital environments. Lower-budget productions are leaping ahead because AI lets a small team accomplish what used to require a small army. The labor implications are real and the guilds are negotiating around them, but the trend is set. AI-assisted, not AI-replacing, content is what 2026 looks like, and that trend is going one direction.
The third force is the cloud. Post-production used to require a building full of expensive workstations and editors who lived within driving distance. Now the dailies upload to the cloud, the editor in Vancouver pulls them down, the colorist in London pulls them down, the visual effects team in Mumbai pulls them down, the composer in Nashville scores against them, and the producer in Atlanta reviews them on a tablet. The work is distributed. The talent is global. The center of gravity, if there is one, is wherever the storage is.
Stack those three forces on top of the cost pressures we already talked about and you get a different industry. Smaller budgets. Fewer of the big swing-for-the-fences pictures. More mid-budget and indie work. Targeted, short-term physical shoots for the scenes that need to be real, followed by the bulk of the work being done digitally on stages and in cloud workflows. Productions can do a week of location work somewhere beautiful, then a week of LED volume work on a stage somewhere cost-effective, then six months of post-production handled by teams scattered across three continents. The lot in Burbank is not necessary in the way it used to be. The cluster is not necessary in the way it used to be. The lean producer follows the math, and the math says you don't need to be in Hollywood.
That brings us to the matter of proximity, and I want to spend a moment on this because it's where a lot of the conventional wisdom is getting out of date. For a hundred years, the argument for being in Los Angeles was that everybody else was in Los Angeles. The agents were there. The casting directors were there. The financiers were there. The rewrite meetings were there. You couldn't run a real production from somewhere else because the deal flow lived in the city and you had to be in the city to be in the deal flow. There was real truth to that.
A lot of that truth has died quietly over the last few years. Casting auditions are recorded and submitted online. Pitch meetings happen on video calls. Production deals close over email and DocuSign. The agent in Beverly Hills and the agent's client in Florida can do business together without either of them ever boarding a plane. Even physical meetings, the kind that still happen and probably always will, can be done with a single trip rather than a permanent residence. None of that means proximity stopped mattering entirely. It means proximity matters in a different way. You don't need to live next door anymore. You need to be a flight away. You need to be reachable. You need to be on the right time zones for the call. And you need bandwidth, because in a cloud-based industry, your internet connection is your front door.
Now we have done enough riding around the country to come back home. Let me take you back to that drive north out of Orlando, because everything we've talked about, the cost pressures driving production out of California, the rise of decentralized hubs, the rebuilding of Florida from the county level up, the rise of virtual production, the death of proximity as it used to be defined, all of it lands at a question about whether the heart of Florida is paying attention.
Ocala sits roughly an hour north of Orlando, which puts it about an hour and ten minutes from the Universal soundstages, an hour and a half from the Vū Orlando virtual production facility, and well within driving range of every piece of existing infrastructure Central Florida has to offer. The Ocala International Airport is right there, capable of handling private aviation, which is how a lot of production talent moves around. Interstate 75 runs right through the metro, which means trucks and equipment can move in and out of the area as easily as they move anywhere in the state. State Road 40 cuts east-west, connecting the area to Daytona and the coast on one side and to Inverness and the Gulf side on the other. The geography is good.
The World Equestrian Center is the headline attraction now, and it's worth understanding what that facility represents. It's not just a horse show venue. It's a destination resort, a hotel and dining complex, a luxury accommodation hub, and an event facility that brings significant national and international traffic to Ocala. When you have a place that can host a major equestrian event, you have a place that can house a production. The hotel rooms, the restaurants, the meeting spaces, the catering operations, the security infrastructure, the staging areas, all of it is already there. You don't have to build it. You don't have to imagine it. You can drive over and see it.
The horse farms themselves are the unsung asset. White board fences. Live oaks dripping Spanish moss. Rolling pastures. Centuries-old barns. Thoroughbreds running in the morning light. There is no place in California, no place in Georgia, no place in Atlanta, no place in Los Angeles that looks like Ocala horse country. It is its own visual signature, and visual signatures are exactly what production companies pay to find. Period pieces. Romantic dramas. Sports films. Documentary work. Equestrian content. Anything that needs to look established and rooted and traditional. Ocala is already that, and it is that without anyone needing to dress a set.
The springs are another asset most people outside the region don't fully appreciate. Silver Springs. Rainbow Springs. Juniper Springs. Salt Springs. Crystal-clear water, jungle vegetation, the kind of underwater photography opportunity that costs a small fortune to fake. The original Tarzan films and early underwater epics used these springs precisely because no soundstage could replicate what nature had already built. They're still here, still photogenic, and still underused as a film resource.
And then there are the warehouses. If you've driven Interstate 75 anywhere through the Marion County stretch in the last five years, you've seen the construction. Distribution centers are going up. Logistics facilities are going up. Auto parts warehouses, e-commerce fulfillment, manufacturing space. The land is available. The development model is proven. The local construction firms know how to build big, simple, flexible, climate-controlled buildings to spec. That same construction expertise, redirected with a different floor plan and a different ceiling height, could just as easily build soundstages. A soundstage is essentially a very tall warehouse with sound isolation, high-amperage power, a grid system, and air conditioning. The building itself is not exotic. The expertise to build it exists locally. The land exists locally. The financing structures used for distribution warehouses could be adapted for production space.
And alongside all of this, the area has been quietly building professional infrastructure for decades. The Ocala metro has been growing steadily since the Florida boom of the 1980s. Private investment has been moving in. Independent professional offices, financial services firms, medical specialists, legal practices, technology and communications professionals, all have been planting flags in this region year over year. The Truesdell professional building out at 200 NW 52nd Avenue, owned and operated by the firm rather than rented from a landlord, is one small example of the kind of permanent local investment that signals confidence in a region. Multiply that pattern across the metro, in different industries, and you get a sense of the underlying momentum that has been building here for some time. People with means and judgment have been quietly betting on this part of Florida.
So what does Ocala have that other places don't? It has land at a cost that no California county and no metro Atlanta county can match. It has a unique visual aesthetic in the horse farms and the springs that can't be duplicated elsewhere. It has existing infrastructure in the World Equestrian Center and the airport and the interstate that takes the edge off site selection. It has a construction industry already building big flexible buildings for other purposes that could be redirected to production. It has proximity to the existing Orlando production cluster without having Orlando's costs. It has a cost of living that allows below-the-line workers to actually afford to live where they work, which is the single biggest structural failure of the Los Angeles model. And it has a quality of life, the kind of life with horses, springs, forests, and small-town pace, that a certain kind of creative person actively seeks out.
What it doesn't have, and we have to be honest about this, is a critical mass of existing production-trained workforce, a sitting incentive program, a national reputation as a production destination, or the kind of cluster effect that draws projects in without anybody having to recruit them. Building all of that would take work and time and, more than anything else, vision.
Here's what would have to happen if forward-thinking minds in this region prevailed. First, the county would need to look at what Orange County did with its twenty-five million dollar, five-year incentive program and ask whether something similar, sized appropriately for Marion County, could be modeled here. The Georgia lesson tells us not to write an uncapped check that subsidizes mostly out-of-state workers. The Orange County model is more disciplined, with requirements for local spending, local hires, and local hotel nights. Done right, a county program could be the catalyst that turns existing assets into actual production activity. Done wrong, it becomes the kind of subsidy program we already examined in Georgia that costs the local treasury and rewards nobody who lives nearby.
Second, the construction community would need to take a serious look at flexible, multi-use buildings that could function as soundstages, virtual production volumes, set construction shops, and prop and costume storage. Build them on speculation if necessary, the way distribution warehouses are sometimes built on speculation, and lease them to productions on flexible terms. The land is available. The construction expertise is available. The capital, given the right combination of incentives and demand signals, can be assembled.
Third, the local colleges and the technical schools would need to start building or expanding programs in the trades that production needs. Set construction, lighting, sound, camera operation, post-production, virtual production technicians, drone operators, equipment maintenance. Not every job in this industry requires a four-year film degree. Many of the most important jobs are craft jobs that pay well and don't require a degree at all. A regional workforce pipeline, tied to actual demand, would tell young people from Ocala and the surrounding counties that they don't have to leave to work in this industry.
Fourth, the permit process would need to be streamlined and made predictable. The Orlando Film Commission already does this well. Marion County could study what they do and replicate or improve on it. A producer needs to know in advance what the permit costs, what the timeline is, and what the restrictions are. Predictability is worth as much as any incentive.
Fifth, the bandwidth and connectivity infrastructure needs to be production-grade. Symmetrical high-speed internet, redundancy, fiber to the major facilities. In a cloud-based industry, your data link is your loading dock. Many distribution centers along the I-75 corridor have already required these upgrades for their own logistics operations. Extending that capability to entertainment production facilities would be incremental rather than transformative.
Sixth, and perhaps most importantly, the region would need a marketing voice. Somebody, or some small coordinated group of somebodies, would need to tell the story. Not flashy. Not gimmicky. Just clear and honest. Here's what we have, here's what it costs, here's how to get a permit, here's where to stay, here's who to hire, here's the visual range available within an hour's drive. The producers and location scouts who would respond to that story are not looking to be impressed. They're looking to be informed.
Now let me give you the honest caveats, because no real conversation about this is worth your time if I just paint a rosy picture and call it a forecast. Florida still lacks a competitive statewide incentive program. Until or unless that changes, every Florida county is fighting Georgia, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Canada with one hand tied behind its back. County incentives can help, and they are helping, but they cannot match a state-level commitment. Georgia, Atlanta especially, has built a cluster that took fifteen years to develop, and clusters are sticky. Talent is there, vendors are there, the muscle memory of how to make television in Georgia is there. Ocala starting now is starting from a different place than Atlanta started fifteen years ago, partly because the industry itself is different now and partly because the competition is more sophisticated.
The virtual production revolution may also cut both ways. The same trends that let production happen in lower-cost regions like Ocala also let it happen in even lower-cost regions, including overseas. There is no reason a streaming series filmed on an LED volume couldn't be done in Eastern Europe as easily as in Florida. Cost competition doesn't stop at the state line or the national border. And the lean economy means that even when productions come, they may bring fewer crew, spend fewer days, and leave behind less economic activity than the old big-cluster productions did.
Talent doesn't appear by waving a wand. It takes years to develop a serious below-the-line workforce. The Orlando talent drain we already discussed shows what happens when the work doesn't keep pace with the graduates. Ocala doesn't have its own film school producing three thousand graduates a year, which is both a problem and not a problem. The problem is that the workforce has to come from somewhere. The not-a-problem is that Ocala could potentially absorb some of that Orlando graduate flow, the way a younger college town can absorb the energy a bigger town squanders, if the jobs are here for them to fill.
And patience, the kind of patience that builds something over a decade rather than a quarter, is in short supply in most political environments. The forward-thinking minds we've been talking about would need to be the kind of minds that can hold a vision through multiple election cycles, through downturns and slow years and noisy critics. That kind of mind exists, but it doesn't exist in unlimited supply.
So we come back to where we started. The horses are still grazing in the morning light. The World Equestrian Center is still drawing visitors from around the world. The warehouses along Interstate 75 are still going up. The springs are still running clear. The roads are still open. The land is still affordable. The question is still on the table.
Could the Ocala metropolitan area, the heart of Florida north of Orlando, be poised for a film, television, and video production boom? I told you at the beginning I wasn't going to tell you yes and I wasn't going to tell you no. After everything we've ridden through together, the most honest answer is this. The conditions for a boom are present in a way they have not been before. The industry is decentralizing. The proximity argument that locked everything into Los Angeles for a century has lost most of its force. The technology is making production leaner and more portable. Florida's existing hubs are showing what county-level commitment can do. The construction expertise, the land, the infrastructure, the visual assets, and the cost advantages are all in place here. What is not yet in place is the coordinated decision to build on that foundation.
That brings us, as promised, back to Rob Lowe and Ireland. A producer who finds it cheaper to fly his host, his contestants, his crew, and his cameras across the Atlantic Ocean than to shoot the same show twenty miles from his own office is not making an emotional decision. He's not anti-California. He's not anti-Hollywood. He's running a business, and the numbers told him exactly what to do. That same producer, looking at the map a few years from now, could just as easily look at Ocala. The numbers will tell him. The visuals will tell him. The infrastructure will tell him. The question is whether, when he looks, the welcome mat will be out, the permit will be ready, the soundstage will be standing, and the workforce will be in place to do the work.
The cameras will keep rolling. The cameras will roll somewhere. They've already left Hollywood in numbers nobody imagined a decade ago. They're rolling in Georgia, in New Mexico, in Vancouver, in Dublin, and on LED volumes in places nobody has heard of yet. They will roll, in the next decade, in places that are paying attention, in places that have prepared, and in places that have made it easy for the people who pay for cameras to choose them.
Whether one of those places is the heart of Florida, with the horses in the pasture and the springs running clear and the warehouses rising along the interstate, is not a question for the camera operators or the producers or the studios. It's a question for the people who live here, who work here, who lead here, and who decide whether the next chapter of this region is one they'll write deliberately or one they'll let happen to them. The same patience and discipline and vision that built the equestrian center, that built the medical complex, that built the distribution network, that built the family offices and the professional buildings and the entire quiet engine of growth that has been running here since the eighties, that same patience and discipline and vision is exactly what would be required.
And so the question, the one we started with up on Interstate 75 looking out over the horse farms and the rising warehouses, isn't really a question about the industry at all. The industry will do what industries do. They will follow the math. They will follow the talent. They will follow the welcome mat.
The real question is whether the heart of Florida intends to roll one out. The cameras will roll somewhere. The only question is whether they roll here.