St. Louis County Approves Incentives Towards Film And TV Production In The Area

The Northland is an ideal place to film a movie or television show. With the change of seasons and bountiful natural and urban landscapes it is a great combination, but these production companies require some incentives to lure them here in the first place.

The St. Louis County Commissioners are well aware of that, and on Tuesday they approved $1million to Film and TV companies as an incentive to make productions here bringing jobs to the area. This will allow production companies to apply for rebates on certain expenses. This is the first incentive established by a county in the state of Minnesota and will be run by the Upper Midwest Film Office.

Riki Mc­Manus is the director of the Upper Midwest Film Office and said to the Duluth News Tribune:

I'm so, so thrilled that our leadership in St. Louis County is so forward-thinking — they get it. It's truly the fastest form of job creation post-pandemic. Right now they has more than two dozen productions interested in filming in the region. But it could take expanded state incentives to get the big-money productions.

Two big productions that Minnesota already has lost out on were The Disney Film "Clouds" and The Mighty Ducks series due to a lack of incentives. A trend in recent years has been for many Film and TV production companies to film in Canada, where it is more cost efficient then filming in the United States. Now that this has been established hopefully it will sway these companies to choose to film here, but this is a long process and with the ongoing pandemic many of these productions are on hold or still in the planning stages.