What do these five 2023 Top 25 American box office films have in common?:
Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 3
The Super Mario Bros Movie
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
John Wick: Chapter 4
Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny
They were all filmed partly in France.
The French government has been aggressively pitching itself as a "one stop shop" for international productions, utilizing a substantial production rebate along with an expansion of studio spaces.
Currently, France offers a Tax Rate For International Production (TRIP), which rebates up to 30% of the eligible production spend up to a cap of $33,000,000. The rate increases an additional 10% when VFX expenses spent on French soil surpass $2.2 million.
France's national film organization - CNC - has been spearheading a France 2030 project entitled "The Great Image Factory" which plans to spend as much as $280 million to double the country's available surface area of sound sets and quadruple the surface area of backlots by 2030.
Another factor in the growth of France film and television production industry is a side effect of the UK's departure from the European Union. Brexit made it more expensive to move back and forth into the UK from Europe, so more productions are staying in Europe and using local sets to stand-in for the UK.
A wide variety of landscapes in France also offers a number of ways productions can save money by limiting the amount of production travel during shoots. For instance, the Anthony Russo and Joe Russo Netflix movie The Gray Man used French locations to substitute for Croatia and the Apple TV+ series Varsity subbed the south of France for a street in Baghdad, Iraq.
Recent high-profile streaming projects that were shot at least partly in France include the Hulu/FX series The Veil, Apple TV+'s Franklin and The New Look, Starz's The Serpent Queen and AMC's The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon.