ALBANY – New York taxpayers are on pace to pump almost a billion dollars into lavish subsidies for television and film productions this year to keep them in town.
Productions such as “Saturday Night Live” and “FBI Most Wanted” sucked up around $21 million in tax credits each in just the first three months of 2025, part of a total whopping $230 million that New York shelled out for the industry for the same period, according to a new report from the good-government group Reinvent Albany.
That’s around $65,000 for each job created by the productions for the quarter, Reinvent said.
“The Governor and Legislature are happy to waste enormous amounts of our tax dollars on an utterly debunked, trickle-down economics scheme because of the substantial political reward they get from the Motion Picture Association, its corporate members, its unions and tens of millions of dollars of top gun Albany lobbyists,” the group wrote in a statement Monday.
New York makes back only about 30 cents for every dollar it spends on the film tax credit, according to a study commissioned by the state and released last year.
The Motion Picture Association, the main lobbying force driving the program, declined to comment to The Post about Reinvent’s report. But it has historically defended the program as helping create and retain union jobs in the state.
“There [were] billions of dollars of value that [were] not taken into account in the [state’s] report that would’ve told a more complete picture of the economic story of this industry,” the group’s tax counsel, Brian O’Leary, told a panel of state senators last year.
Despite fierce criticism from some lawmakers, the legislature and governor approved a two-year, $1.4 billion extension of the existing film tax credit as part of this year’s state budget deal. They also added a 12-year, $1.2 billion tax credit for “independent” films and shows.
Here are the top 10 recipients of film tax credits from the state’s first quarter of 2025, how much they received, and how many full-time equivalent positions they created:
- “Saturday Night Live,” $21.2 million, 254 jobs
- “FBI Most Wanted” (Season 2), $21 million, 290 jobs
- “Dead Ringers,” $20.8 million, 315 jobs
- “Power Book II: Ghost,” $20 million, 275 jobs
- “The Watcher,” $16.2 million, 254 jobs
- “Dr. Death,” $15.7 million, 207 jobs
- “Let The Right One In,” $15.5 million, 202 jobs
- “FBI Most Wanted” (Season 1), $15.2 million, 249 jobs
- “Katy Keene,” $12.6 million, 199 jobs
- “Only Murders in the Building,” $12.3 million, 192 jobs
Critics joined Reinvent in ripping the taxpayer-funded subsidies.
“What interest of the New York taxpayer is being advanced by giving $21M dollars in breaks to Saturday Night Live which is so synonymous with New York State that they start each show by announcing “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” Are they going somewhere else?” state Assemblyman Ed Ra (R-Nassau) posted to X.
State Sen. James Skoufis (D-Orange) said in a statement to The Post, “The state should be making economic development investments based on evidence, not feel-good anecdotes or flashy headlines.
“The federal government just blew a $10 billion hole in our state budget, and I can think of no better place to find savings than cutting the disproven, expensive film tax credit.”
But Gov. Kathy Hochul has defended New York’s high rate of spending on the issue.
Hochul’s office declined to comment to The Post on Monday, but Empire State Development, the state’s development arm that oversees the program, defended it and claimed Reinvent’s math is wrong.
“Reinvent Albany’s math is worse than pineapple on pizza,” the agency said in a statement.
“New York gets a 700% return on its investment from the industry — over $1.1 billion in the last quarter alone — which means tens of thousands of jobs for New Yorkers. ESD’s production credit program is reasonable, responsible, and helps keep the Empire State competitive against other states desperately trying to copy our success at attracting and accelerating local film production.”
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