NZ to Spend Another Half Billion Dollars to Lure Hollywood Back to ‘Wellywood’

Finance Minister Nicola Willis has committed another $577 million to the film subsidy fund.

Visitors can take a guided tour of the Hobbiton movie set in New Zealand. Timo Kaestner/Shutterstock

The New Zealand government is to try to regain the country’s status as a movie location of choice for big-budget Hollywood productions—something that saw Wellington widely referred to as “Wellywood” in its heyday.

To do so, available funding for the International Screen Production Rebate will increase to $250 million (US$147 million) for 2024/25, and to $210 million from 2025/26 onwards.

Eligible productions will be entitled to a 20 percent rebate where production costs are more than $15 million for feature films, and $4 million for television productions.

“A further 5 percent rebate is available to productions spending more than $30 million, which meet additional criteria for industry and economic growth,” Finance Minister Nicola Willis said.

The local screen industry keeps about 24,000 people in work and has generated about $3.5 billion in annual revenue, she said.

Overseas film companies’ local productions had brought nearly $7.5 billion to New Zealand in the past decade, which was supported by $1.5 billion in rebate payments.

“The reality is we simply won’t get the offshore investment in our highly successful screen sector without continuing this scheme,” Willis said.

Aiming to Regain Hollywood Popularity

The unique geography of the small South Pacific country, coupled with modern facilities such as high-speed broadband and state-of-the-art post-production facilities, have seen major movies filmed there including Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy, Mission Impossible: Fallout, M3GAN, the Avatar series of films, and the 2005 version of King Kong.

However, landscape and amenities aren’t enough on their own, with other countries keen to attract big-budget epics not just for the money they bring to the local economy but also the tourism boost they provide.

New Zealand tourist operators still profit from taking visitors to Lord of the Rings locations, including the town of Hobbiton, now a permanent fixture.

It’s been 22 years since Wellington came to a halt for the world premiere of the first of the LOTR movies.

Although successive governments have maintained the subsidy, other countries have since started offering more.

Cabinet therefore decided to increase support to better reflect “current forecast demand,” according to Willis, who made the announcement at Jackson’s Weta Workshop production facility in Wellington.

Latest to enter an increasingly crowded market is Queensland, which plans to become “a global leader in the screen industry by 2028” by offering government incentives (pdf).