Homegrown Hollywood

For years, talented filmmakers in Wisconsin have faced a difficult choice: move to major coastal hubs to find resources, or struggle against a severe lack of local opportunities and available crew. But recent trends show the landscape of film may be shifting inland.

The film industry has experienced a seismic shift over the past decade, with more and more productions leaving Los Angeles for more unique and affordable shooting locations. With that, Hollywood’s remote production boom has sparked a new gold rush for untapped stories in the Midwest. Hoping to capture that momentum, Wisconsin recently launched a state film office, Film Wisconsin, and a suite of tax incentives aimed at drawing low-to-mid-budget productions directly to its historic towns and natural landscapes.

But attracting productions is only half the battle; hosting them requires a highly skilled local workforce and appropriate amenities. To help make this a reality, faculty at Northcentral Technical College are working from the ground up to help build a local “film ecosystem,” training the next generation of cinematographers, editors and directors to ensure that when productions arrive, Wisconsin is ready to roll.

The new film office and tax credits were announced by Governor Tony Evers during his 2026 State of the State address in February. The program was created by the 2025-27 Biennial Budget and signed into law by Evers last year, as part of a broader effort to bolster travel and tourism in Wisconsin.

To be eligible for tax credits, productions must spend a minimum of $100,000 for projects 30 minutes or longer and a minimum of $50,000 for projects less than 30 minutes. Projects may receive up to $1 million in tax credits per fiscal year. Eligible production expenses include cast and crew wages, accommodations, costs of set construction and operations, purchase or rental of facilities and equipment, location fees and other production-related goods and services purchased and consumed within the state.

During a March 12 visit to Northcentral Technical College in Wausau, Evers stood in the heart of the college’s Studio 7, surrounded by cinema cameras and an ultra-high-definition production screen. He wasn’t just admiring the state-of-the-art tech; he was looking at the future of Wisconsin’s film industry. NTC’s unique video production program is being heralded as the vital first step in building the local workforce needed to turn the region into a viable destination for independent filmmakers.

“Creating something like this here in Central Wisconsin I think is really going to make a difference,” Evers said to NTC staff, faculty and students. “There’s just a lot of really talented people in Wisconsin that can do this. We are going to be at the forefront of this. It’s exciting times. You’re perfectly positioned to deal with it.”

Establishing an ecosystem

This isn’t Wisconsin’s first crack at a tax incentive program for film production. In 2006, Governor Jim Doyle signed legislation offering incentives, which went into effect in 2008. Incentives included a 25% tax credit on certain salaries and wages and a 15% production services credit for permanent infrastructure investment. The program had some successes, such as Michael Mann’s 2009 “Public Enemies,” staring Johnny Depp, which filmed in Manitowish Waters, Oshkosh, Marshfield and other locations. But Doyle severely dialed back the cap limit in 2009 and the program was never really able to recover.

For the program to succeed this time around, NTC videography faculty member Jila Nikpay stresses that Wisconsin needs to establish a stronger “film ecosystem” to support the art form.

“It’s culture, basically,” she said. “If we encourage people to appreciate independent film, to see a value in that — the fact that it’s not just culture but it also brings some economic benefits to the community — if we encourage that, then the tax incentive would be successful. Things don’t just succeed in abstraction.”

Nikpay explained that an affective “ecosystem” that supports independent filmmaking in Wisconsin relies on different parties contribute in unique ways.

“This school contributes by training people technically to be crew members and work on film sets,” Nikpay said.

NTC offers a comprehensive, hands-on video production program that, unlike others in the Wisconsin technical college system, isn’t tied to a specific industry segment such as broadcasting or online content creation. The program serves about 50 students a year and aims to prepare them for both in-house production roles and freelance careers.

“It is unique because we not only training the students on tools and techniques, how to use the gear, the cameras, the audio equipment, the grip equipment, the lighting equipment, but also how to write a story,” Nikpay said. “We also really nurture creativity and problem solving because that makes our students far more competitive in the market ... we’re not just teaching them technical stuff and sending them out there. We want them to be able to be imaginative and contribute to wherever they are employed.”

NTC also established the Film, Farm & Culture Fest of Wausau last year, an annual summer film festival that celebrates award-winning independent films selected from around the world. The film festival program includes fiction and documentary films exploring the relationships between farming, land and rural life. The festival returns July 23 to Aug. 1 this summer, with screenings Thursday, Fridays and Saturdays. Nikpay hopes to draw some filmmakers to the this year’s festival for post-screening discussions.

“The festival that we offer also supports independent filmmaking, award-winning filmmaking, and nurturing an audience for that,” she said.

The tax incentive is now a vital part of that ecosystem that aims to encourage people to make films in the state. Local filmmakers are at the center of the ecosystem, producing new ideas and generating local projects to spur more interest in the area.

Nikpay said there is still far more the state can do to support the ecosystem, such as grant funding to back production budgets of home-grown films. Nikpay, who also has a decades-long career of producing short narrative and documentary films, cited that Minnesota’s expenditure for arts is $7.85 per capita, whereas Wisconsin’s is 20 cents per capita.

“Filmmaking is very expensive without that support,” she said. “There’s not one single grant — not one — in Wisconsin for filmmakers. That is shocking to me. If one of my students wants to make a film, they have to go on GoFundMe.”

One local filmmaker, Nate Sheppard, is establishing the Northwoods Film Office, a satellite of Film Wisconsin, in Rhinelander. The goal of the Northwoods film office is to connect potential productions (no matter how large or small) with available resources of the northern region (as far south as Wausau).

“We’re trying to catalog anybody up here who has skills related to filmmaking, whether that be in front of the camera or running the camera, sound, lighting, all that type of stuff,” Sheppard said. “But also kind of film-adjacent businesses, such as catering, lodging, entertainment lawyers, things like you know we don’t always think about being needs for film productions.

Of course, the other big draw of the region is locations. Sheppard’s film office is also working to develop a map of interesting locations and sites for potential productions to showcase.

“We’re trying to asset map those locations and make it really easy, have some photos and things for those locations, so when someone says, ‘I want to find a farmhouse. I want to find a cafe. What could I find up here that would look good for this film production?’ Then just make that pathway really easy for filmmakers to get in touch with some of our local resources,” Sheppard said.

The film office also hosts monthly meetups to bring together creatives, film-minded technicians and any newcomers interested in learning more about filmmaking.

“The film meetups have ranged just from five to I think we’ve had close to 30 people at a single meetup,” Sheppard said. “Some of these people live up here and are just interested. So part of it for me is to be able to offer experience and opportunities and education for anybody interested in film.”

Putting Wisconsin on the map

So are you likely to see Batman perched atop the Dudley Tower anytime soon? Certainly not. The Wisconsin tax credit isn’t likely to draw a big blockbuster production; it targets mid-to-low budget independent films. But the upside of that is those productions, unlike a superhero movie, are more likely to be imbued with the state’s culture.

Last year’s “Green and Gold,” for example, centers around a Wisconsin farmer who bets his mortgage on the Packers winning the 1994 Super Bowl. The movie was filmed in Green Bay, Door County and northern Wisconsin and grossed a modest $1.7 million at the box office, not counting additional revenue from streaming and rentals.

Sheppard said there is a hunger for Midwest stories to be told on the screen, citing director M. Night Shyamalan (“The Sixth Sense,” “Signs”), whose films has have grossed more than $3 billion globally.

“I talked to one filmmaker who worked with M. Night Shyamalan,” Sheppard said, “and I guess Shyamalan was like, ‘You should go and tell stories from the Midwest. There’s not a lot of stories being told coming out of the Midwest.’ ... There’s sort of this new gold rush of film stories that are in the Midwest, both narrative and documentary, that are these really fascinating and overlooked things that people I think are getting excited about coming to the middle of the country to discover.”

This initiative has the potential to further share Wisconsin’s culture and locations off-screen, too. When a Hallmark Christmas movie filmed in Door County during the off-season, it injected hundreds of thousands into the local economy over a few weeks.

“Just on the production alone, during those two weeks, I think something like $650,000 was spent in Door County alone,” Sheppard said. “So that’s $650,000 of economic stimulation during your off-season for a small community like Door County. That’s tremendous.”

After the film aired last year, Door County developed a Christmas movie tour that invited people to stop at all the different sites from the movie, generating even more travel and tourism dollars for local businesses.

“They ran the numbers on how many people participated in that. I think it was something like 1,000 people completed that tour this past Christmas, and an additional 2,000 or so at least started it,” Sheppard said. “Then they added up the receipts that were turned in, because if you spent at certain businesses and then turned in the receipts to the chamber, you were entered into a drawing, and I think it was something like $16,000 worth of receipts that were turned in. And that’s not even all of it.”

Sheppard said these are the kind of success stories filmmakers can share with potential investors when seeking funding for their next project.

“Wisconsin is a very industrial and practically minded community,” he said. “You have to sell the money people on the economics of art. That’s part of why I’ve stored up some of these anecdotes; I talk to more of the business-minded and more of the civic, government entities, and I can say ‘This could mean $600,000 of economic windfall.’”

With more success stories like the Hallmark movie, and a stronger filmmaking ecosystem, the state could see a significant return on investment, and in turn the world could see more of Wisconsin and its creative minds.

“You don’t have to go to Hollywood to make films,” Nikpay said. “You can find things in your backyard, stories in your own backyard, and create a wonderful engaging work that people want to see and hopefully support.”