Service industry versus indigenous industry

A service industry sells crew days, stages, locations and post facilities to productions owned elsewhere. An indigenous industry owns the copyright in what it makes. Both employ people. Only one of them keeps earning after wrap.

Ireland is where the critique is best documented. Its tax credit is legally conditional on either cultural value or industry development and employment quality, a construction that effectively equates the two, and the phrase “quality employment” is nowhere defined in the legislation despite the money depending on it. Irish Equity put the objection in one sentence: “the real value of the film and television industry does not exist at the point of production.” It exists in copyright, and buy-out contracts have become the norm rather than the exception.

New Zealand is where the consequence is visible. Two decades of subsidy and around two billion New Zealand dollars could not stop the most valuable asset in its screen ecosystem being sold offshore for US$1.625 billion in 2021 and the entire staff being laid off by the buyer two years later, because the state never owned any of it. A cautionary parallel sits closer to home in Northern Ireland, where a share of United Kingdom television drama spend that had reached 12 percent fell to 1.4 percent by 2019 once one production ended.

Source: Denis Murphy, Maynooth University, Irish Journal of Arts Management and Cultural Policy, Vol 10(2), 2024, open access under CC-BY at https://culturalpolicy.ie/index.php/ijamcp/article/download/2756/800/8034 , for the statutory construction, the undefined employment condition, the discontinued labour expenditure publication and the Northern Ireland comparison. The Irish Equity position is recorded in the Oireachtas Committee on Budgetary Oversight, Report on Section 481, May 2023, free PDF at https://data.oireachtas.ie/ie/oireachtas/committee/dail/33/committee_on_budgetary_oversight/reports/2023/2023-05-09_report-on-section-481-film-tax-credit_en.pdf . The New Zealand sequence is compiled in Case 2 and cross-case point 10 of the Film industry playbooks research map.

First used in: 4.3 · Five countries, five different answers