How Vancouver changed the way Hollywood works

This is a researched feature, separate from Nick Atwal’s personal film reviews.

Most stories about Vancouver and Hollywood start with the movies. This one starts underneath: the incentives, crews, postproduction studios and economics that let British Columbia take on international productions at scale. It’s less glamorous down here. There are spreadsheets. Then it asks what all that machinery means for Canadian stories told from the same city.

Figures come from Creative BC, which administers B.C.’s two motion picture tax credit programs, and from the Government of British Columbia’s budget documents and announcements. They’re provincial totals, not Vancouver counts. For how the streets themselves get disguised, see Why Vancouver can play so many other cities.

1. The location machine

   $3.56 billion in B.C. production spending, 2024 (Creative BC estimate)

   Streets, forest, waterfront and soundstages let a production find very different settings in one region, and producers weigh that range against cost and convenience. When Deadpool closed the Georgia Viaduct in 2015, the production said in a statement reported at the time that it had scouted North America and Europe before choosing Vancouver, for budgetary reasons and the city’s increasingly positive reputation for supporting filming. Even the clock helps. Vancouver shares the Pacific time zone with Los Angeles, an advantage Richard Brownsey of Creative BC cited to Playback in explaining the industry’s recovery. Nobody in Los Angeles has to get up early to panic about Vancouver.

   Provincial policy writes much of that budget case. International productions claim the Production Services Tax Credit, a labour-based credit administered by Creative BC. Budget 2025, released in March 2025, set out an increase in the basic credit from 28 to 36 per cent for productions starting principal photography after December 31, 2024, plus a new major production credit worth 2 per cent of qualified B.C. labour for productions with B.C. costs above $200 million. Cross that line and the province says thank you. In tax form, naturally.

   By 2024, the machine was running again after a weak year. Creative BC estimates that film and television projects spent $3.56 billion in the province in 2024, up 61 per cent from $2.21 billion in 2023. Live-action filming accounted for $1.65 billion, more than double the year before, and production for subscription streaming services reached $1.22 billion. Creative BC points to B.C.-shot titles such as Longlegs, Heretic and The Monkey, and notes that Tron: Ares wrapped in Vancouver in 2024.

2. Local crews

   41,999 jobs, 2024 (Creative BC economic model)

   Stages and tax credits don’t make a film. Trained people do. The workforce is the infrastructure, and most of it is organized. IATSE Local 891, chartered in 1962, represents motion picture workers across British Columbia and the Yukon, and ICG Local 669 represents IATSE camera crews in Western Canada. Teamsters Local 155 covers eight divisions: drivers, security, catering, animal handlers and wranglers, mechanics, marine personnel and miscellaneous. Miscellaneous is doing a lot of work there. The Directors Guild of Canada’s B.C. District Council represents directors along with production managers, assistant directors and location departments, and UBCP/ACTRA represents performers.

   These unions bargain with Hollywood’s producers directly, through the Canadian affiliate of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), alongside the B.C. branch of the Canadian Media Producers Association. In July 2023, with U.S. writers and actors on strike, all five B.C. unions and guilds ratified a one-year extension with a 5 per cent raise. Under provincial labour rules, every one of them had to accept it for the deal to take effect. Five for five, or no deal. No pressure. Agreements running to 2028 followed, including a 2025–2028 contract for DGC BC and a three-year B.C. Master Production Agreement for UBCP/ACTRA performers that took effect on April 1, 2025.

   Both main credits are calculated on B.C. labour, so the subsidy grows with local hiring. Creative BC’s economic model, CIERA, estimates that the motion picture sector supported 41,999 total jobs and $3.1 billion in GDP in 2024, both well above 2023 and slightly above 2022. Those are modelled provincial estimates, not a head count of union members. Creative BC also cautions that 2024’s higher spending was concentrated in fewer, larger productions, so it didn’t bring the same volume of production starts. For anyone hired show by show, a bigger year isn’t always a busier one.

3. A postproduction centre

   Sony Pictures Imageworks announced its headquarters move in 2014

   Visual effects, animation and finishing keep the industry working long after the shooting day. Two moves in 2014 showed how far that work had shifted north. In March, Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic opened a permanent 30,000-square-foot studio in Gastown, in space Pixar’s Vancouver studio had occupied until it closed in October 2013. In May, Sony Pictures Imageworks confirmed it was moving its headquarters from Culver City, California, to a 74,000-square-foot facility at Pacific Centre, keeping a small base in Culver City for Los Angeles clients. The headquarters moved north. A spare key stayed in Culver City. Its executives pointed to incentives, Vancouver’s growing pool of visual effects talent and the city’s closeness to Los Angeles.

   That capacity now turns out work audiences know without knowing where it was made. Imageworks led the animation of KPop Demon Hunters (2025), the Sony Pictures Animation feature released by Netflix, at its Vancouver and Montreal studios. Provincial policy backs the sector separately: industry tax guides describe B.C.’s Digital Animation, Visual Effects and Post-Production (DAVE) credit as an additional 16 per cent of qualified B.C. labour directly attributable to that work, claimed alongside one of the two main credits. DAVE, to be clear, is a tax credit, not a guy in accounting. When Imageworks announced its move in 2014, the base rate was 17.5 per cent.

   Creative BC’s statistics treat this as production in its own right, tracking projects from the start of principal photography or key animation and reporting visual-effects-only and animation work separately from live action. In 2024, while live-action spending more than doubled, Creative BC reported lower visual-effects-only and animation volumes than in 2023, and Framestore closed its Vancouver studio that July, citing an industry-wide slowdown in content production. Same year, same province, opposite directions. Budget 2025 then restored animation productions’ access to B.C.’s regional and distant location credits, from January 1, 2025, for studios with a physical office in those regions.

4. The doubling paradox

   Foreign productions: 86.5 per cent of 2024 volume

   The better Vancouver plays somewhere else, the less often audiences recognize its contribution. It’s a job where a perfect performance means nobody noticed you were there. The money points the same way. Of the $3.56 billion Creative BC estimates for 2024, foreign productions accounted for $3.08 billion, or 86.5 per cent, and domestic productions for $480 million, or 13.5 per cent.

   That dependence cuts both ways. Creative BC’s figure fell from $3.33 billion in 2022 to $2.21 billion in 2023, the year of the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes in the United States, before recovering in 2024. Screen Global Production, reporting Creative BC data, linked a 2023 fall in the industry’s contribution to provincial GDP partly to those strikes. Decisions made in the American industry arrive in Vancouver as work, or as its absence.

   None of this is hidden by accident: a foreign production pays for Vancouver to look like somewhere else. Industrially, success means more spending. Culturally, it means a city audiences recognize. The two can pull in opposite directions.

5. Canadian storytelling

   123 domestic projects in 2024, down from 161

   Local filmmakers and festivals raise a different question: not what the city can imitate, but what it says on screen as itself. Domestic production is the smaller part of the provincial picture, but it isn’t standing still. Creative BC reports that domestic volume rose 5 per cent to $480 million in 2024 even though the number of domestic projects fell from 161 to 123, a shift the agency reads as fewer but larger productions. Domestic television series grew 28 per cent, while made-for-television movies declined 9 per cent.

   Public money is aimed squarely at this part of the industry. Film Incentive BC, the credit for Canadian-owned and -controlled productions, was set to rise from 35 to 40 per cent in Budget 2025 for productions starting principal photography after December 31, 2024, a bigger increase than the one percentage point the province had first announced in December 2024. A government outdoing its own announcement. Mark the date. Creative BC also funds projects directly: in March 2024 it announced $1.8 million in production financing for sixteen B.C. filmmakers’ projects.

   Festivals and local audiences are where those films meet the city. The Hollywood North’s list of films that let Vancouver be Vancouver applies a different test from the industrial one. Not how much was spent, but whether the place matters to the story.

Reading the numbers

Creative BC’s estimate of $3.56 billion across 372 film and television projects in 2024 is a provincial total, not a Vancouver count, and it covers animation and visual-effects work as well as filming. It measures B.C. labour, goods and services rather than full production budgets, and it leaves out commercials, corporate and music videos, video games and broadcasters’ in-house production. Creative BC also calls the 2024 data incomplete, because tax-credit applications arrive well after principal photography or key animation begins, so the figures may be revised. Even the statistics are waiting on paperwork.

Scale shows industrial reach. It doesn’t automatically buy better representation for local stories. The crews, stages and digital studios that international work built are also there for Canadian filmmakers. Vancouver has spent years learning to look like somewhere else. Whether it uses that skill to tell stories set here is the question worth watching.

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