If you didn't stay up after the Academy Awards for WCPO-TV's newscast, here's Tanya O'Rourke's scoop that Channel 9 was promoting all night: Producer Randall Emmett says he might shoot three more movies and possibly a TV series in Greater Cincinnati.
O'Rourke interviewed Emmett, who's producing his fourth Bruce Willis movie in town, because he was one of the producers on Martin Scorsese's The Irishman nominated for an Academy Award.
"We're lining up another three movies this year. We're sort of 'camped in' in Cincinnati right now," Emmett told Channel 9.
He's planning a fifth film with Willis "that I think we'll do here." And he dropped this one: "We're in the middle of developing a big TV series I want to bring here."
Why?
Because of Ohio's Motion Picture Tax Credits, which makes it very lucrative for Hollywood to film in the Cincinnati area.
A chart in the Dayton Daily News Sunday showed that since 2017 Emmett's company has collected $7.7 million in Ohio tax credits for four films: 10 Minutes Gone and Reprisal with Willis; Gotti with John Travolta; and Inconceivable with Nicholas Cage, Gina Gershon and Faye Dunaway.
Since Ohio's tax incentive program started in 2009, the state has awarded $120.7 million to 119 completed projects. American Factory, the Oscar-winning documentary by Yellow Springs filmmakers Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, received a $119,502.12 tax credit, according to the Dayton paper.
Ohio's tax breaks are a big reason MovieMaker magazine recently ranked Cincinnati No. 14 on the nation's "Best Places To Live And Work As A Moviemaker 2020."
"Ohio's 30% tax credit has cemented its spot as a thriving film destination for the foreseeable future," said MovieMaker editor-in-chief Tim Molloy in Film Cincinnati's press release.
When Open Source with Bruce Willis was announced, Film Cincinnati Executive Director Kristen Schlotman said the real excitement of having film productions in town is "seeing how many jobs these production companies create for locals and how much money they spend while in town. That’s what we care about."
Schlotman says the motion picture industry had an economic impact of nearly $80 million in the Greater Cincinnati area in 2017 and 2018, according to the latest figures studied by the University of Cincinnati Economics Center.
Talk of a television series shooting here is not new. Schlotman mentioned the possibility of a TV series on WVXU's Cincinnati Edition in December 2017, and again on October 2018, when Emmett's was filming Inconceivable.
