Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/50877
INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT By PAUL BRENT Incentives abound in the cross-border movie industry. picture The big The millions of 'tweens packing their local theatre to watch the second instalment of the Twilight series may not realize, or even care, that the Forks, Wash., school where Edward Cullen and Jacob Black vie for Bella Swan's affection is actually Vancouver's David Thompson Secondary School. Canadian cities Toronto and Vancouver earned their "Hollywood North" moniker while the dollar was low. Now with the greenback and the loonie nearing parity, tax credits are a tool being wielded by Canadian provin- cial governments in hopes of holding on to their piece of the U.S. movie business. When the Hollywood dream factory decides to make part or all of a film in Canada, it receives "service" tax credits based upon what the filmmakers spend on making the movie in the country. The provinces of Quebec, Alberta, and Ontario recently announced enhanced tax credits for film producers. Hollywood is met in Canada by an organized army of service producers who can help out as required. Big- budget American flicks produced in Canada, where the big-name stars, writ- ers, and directors are airlifted into loca- tions north of the border, are known as service productions in the trade. "They can do all the work and they can put [the film] on their resume, but they didn't raise the financing, they won't end up owning the copyright probably, they will just end up getting a fee," says Austin Wong, head of business and legal affairs at Rhombus Media Inc. While outsiders would think the fate of Canadian filmmakers such as Rhombus would be tied to the status of the Canadian dollar, an irresistible attraction at US $0.65 and a major barrier at its current near-parity level, the relative worth of the two dollars is not that big a deal, because companies such as Rhombus are not part of the Hollywood machine. Their independ- ence was in fact designed by government policy intended to bolster the independ- ence of domestic filmmakers. For many of its films, Rhombus does co-productions with film INHOUSE DECEMBER 2009/JANUARY 2010 • 37