Orlando Film Incentive Program Orange County: The $25 Million Bet to Revive Central Florida’s Production Industry
For over a decade, Central Florida’s film production community has operated in a structural vacuum: world-class educational institutions producing trained graduates, a residual crew base with deep experience from the Hollywood East era, and soundstage infrastructure that remains underutilized but no meaningful financial incentive to attract the productions that would put all of these assets to work. That changed in November 2025, when the Orange County Board of County Commissioners approved the Orlando film incentive program Orange County has been developing since May 2024. The $25 million commitment, funded through Tourist Development Tax revenue, represents the region’s most significant public investment in film production since the state’s incentive program was dismantled. For local crew, freelancers offering Orlando videographer services, and the film schools that have been training students for jobs that didn’t exist locally, the program’s success or failure will determine whether Orlando’s production industry has a future.
Program Structure and Funding
Orange County has committed $25 million over five years, beginning in fiscal year 2026, with $5 million allocated annually through fiscal year 2030. The funding source is the county’s Tourist Development Tax a 6 percent levy on hotel and short-term rental stays that generated a record $359.46 million in collections during the 2023–2024 fiscal year. Production incentives are funded through the TDT, while staff and administration are supported by the county’s General Fund.
The program is managed through a new Film Incentive Administrator position within Orange County, responsible for overseeing applications, selections, and payments. The county partners with the Orlando Economic Partnership and the Orlando Film Commission for permitting, site selection, and regional marketing. This institutional structure leverages existing organizations the Orlando Film Commission has been the region’s production liaison for decades while adding dedicated administrative capacity for incentive management.
How the Program Was Developed
The program’s design was informed by a Film Incentive Working Group established by the Orange County Commission in May 2024. Composed of industry professionals, educators, and labor representatives, the group studied successful incentive models nationwide and developed a program calibrated to the region’s size and resources. The working group’s recommendation emphasized using film and television production as a tourism promotion tool productions filmed in Orlando generate wide-reaching visual exposure for the destination which justified the use of tourist tax revenue for the program.
The $5 million annual commitment is modest by national standards. Hillsborough, Pinellas, and Palm Beach counties in Florida have operated similar TDT-funded programs, and states like Georgia, Illinois, and Texas now commit hundreds of millions annually to their production incentive programs. However, the Orange County program represents a philosophical shift: the recognition that Orlando’s tourism infrastructure its hotels, restaurants, transportation networks, and leisure economy can serve double duty as production support infrastructure, and that the investment pays dividends in both direct economic impact and destination marketing.
The Workforce Challenge
The incentive program addresses the supply side of Orlando’s production equation giving productions financial reasons to come but the demand side presents its own challenges. Orlando’s working crew base, while experienced, has contracted significantly since the Hollywood East era. Many skilled professionals have migrated to Georgia, Louisiana, or the Carolinas to find consistent work. Local actor and SAG-AFTRA member Chris Greene, who has over 20 years of industry experience, has acknowledged that he doesn’t prepare his acting students to work locally because the job market for sustained professional work in Orlando has been too thin.
Rebuilding the crew base will require not just attracting productions but retaining the workers those productions hire. This means addressing practical infrastructure issues public transportation access to production facilities, housing affordability for crew members, and the density of support vendors that contributed to the original Hollywood East decline. If a crew member can ride the train to Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta for $3, as Greene has pointed out, Orlando needs to offer comparable accessibility to compete for that talent.
What the Program Means for Orlando’s Production Ecosystem
The Orange County film incentive program arrives at a moment when Central Florida’s production assets are undervalued relative to their potential. The region has more than 10 soundstages, over 160,000 square feet of production space, and the most concentrated population of trained entertainment industry workers outside the traditional coastal markets many of them working in themed entertainment rather than film because the film work wasn’t available. The educational pipeline from UCF, Full Sail, and Valencia continues to produce graduates who are eager to work locally but have had to leave to build careers.
The program also positions Orlando within a broader national trend of county-level incentive programs supplementing or replacing state-level programs that have been inconsistent or eliminated. Florida remains one of the few major states without a robust statewide production incentive, which has put the burden on individual counties to compete. Orange County’s entry into this space signals that Central Florida’s leadership recognizes the production industry as an economic development priority not just a legacy of the theme park era, but a growth sector in its own right.
For producers evaluating Orlando, the incentive program is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the region’s revival. What makes Orlando genuinely competitive is the combination of incentive funding, existing soundstage infrastructure, a deep talent pool crossover from the themed entertainment industry, year-round sunshine, geographic diversity that can double for virtually any domestic location, and the lowest hotel occupancy costs of any major production market. Whether the $25 million bet pays off depends on whether these assets can be assembled into a production ecosystem as efficient and accessible as the one Orlando briefly possessed and lost in the 1990s.
