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Mayor Emanuel and the Chicago Film Office at the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) recently announced that local film and media production have yet again reached record levels in 2017. Last year, 580 individual film and media projects recorded an all-time high combined total of 2,404 production days, resulting in an estimated $423 million in job creation and expenditures. Chicago has seen steady year over year increases in media production since 2011.
(Scene from Chicago Fire, NBC)
The rise in Chicago filming and commercial production has boosted local spending and job creation, while increasing traffic for a wide range of local businesses, hotel rooms, office and warehouse leasing, vehicle and equipment leasing, construction supplies, and local tax revenues.
According to the Illinois Film Office–which awards a 30 percent tax credit to film–television and advertising productions for qualified expenditures of Illinois crew, goods and services, projects in 2017 generated an estimated $423 million in Illinois spending and employed 13,797 non-extra job hires along with $251 million in wages.
Film, television and media production continued with record level activity in 2017 with eight full-season series, plus portions of two others, filming throughout the year. NBC’s Chicago Fire, Chicago PD and Chicago Med, FOX’s Empire, and Netflix’s Easy all renewed for additional seasons. Showtime launched a new series, The Chi in addition to Shameless returning for several weeks of filming the seventh consecutive season. Amazon launched Electric Dreams and two new comedy shows, Pop TV’s Hot Date and the Comedy Central pilot South Side both filmed here in 2017 and are expected to go to series in 2018.
Studio features Widows (New Regency) and Captive State (Amblin), and portions of the action blockbuster Rampage (Warner Bros) showed a strong return in major motion picture production, and independent features – most locally produced – including The Pages, Hala, What They Had, Soul Sessions and Book of Leah all filmed here in their entirety and continued a five-year growing trend in the creation of home grown content for national distribution.
For more information about the Chicago Film office, and 2017 achievements, click here to read the full press release.
