James July-August 2024 web - Flipbook - Page 39
I
f you have seen a
Marvel movie in
the last 10 years
and stayed until
the end credits, you
might have noticed
the Georgia peach
logo. Since Marvel
movies often feature
a mid-credits and
post-credits scene, much more so
than most other movies, even more
people saw that little logo (or giant
logo if they were in an IMAX). That
logo is the result of the aggressive
tax incentives here that have now
resulted in hundreds— or depending
on how you count, thousands— of
television and film productions being
shot in Georgia over the last 20 years.
Georgia has a history of filmmaking in the state, with notable
titles like “Deliverance,” “Fried Green
Tomatoes” and “Driving Miss Daisy”
also racking up awards with their
Georgia settings. “Deliverance” star
Burt Reynolds liked filming here,
working on several other movies like
“Smokey and the Bandit” that called
Georgia home. But the tax incentives
took the state to a new level for production. The aggressiveness of the
tax immediately lured companies to
begin shooting here and eventually
for production crew— sound mixers,
boom operators, set designers— to
start living here.
With a full workforce being
increasingly easy to find, building an
entire studio here only made sense.
Adopted Atlantan Tyler Perry led
the way, filming the hugely popular
Madea series here almost exclusively. By 2013, the state landed a
whale— Pinewood Studios, which
would be opening a studio as a joint
venture with River’s Rock LLC— a
company owned by the Cathy family
of Chick-fil-A fame.
Now known as Trilith Studios
since Pinewood sold its stake in
2019, the studio hasn’t missed a
beat by being home to what could
be this year’s most talked about
movie, the Francis Ford Coppola
epic “Megalopolis.”
FROM CHICKEN CHAIN TO PATTERSON ERA
Dan Cathy’s interest in the film
industry kicked off with the filming
E AR LY MOR N IN G FOG ON TH E TRI LI TH STUDI O LOT
of the Lifetime show “Drop Dead
Diva.” The show was looking for a
space to rent outside Atlanta and
eventually landed in one of Cathy’s
airplane hangars. Within a few
years, Cathy was in conversation
with Pinewood Studios to develop
an American operation. Pinewood is
most famous for being the home of
Bond— James Bond— and they were
looking for a place in the U.S. to film.
Selling Georgia and its tax incentives came easily and Pinewood and
River’s Rock spent about $50 million
in their first investment, mostly for
buying land and building sound
stages for filming.
The timing was perfect. In the
middle of building out then-Pinewood Studios, direct spending by
the film industry increased from $92
million in 2007 to $2.7 billion in 2018.
The $500 million box office “AntMan” was the studio’s debut project.
“Captain America: Civil War” was the
studio’s sophomore effort, garnering
a cool $1.15 billion worldwide. That
same year, the studio hired tech leader and dean of Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts—
J U LY/AU G UST 2 0 2 4
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