The Story Has Moved Past the Tax Credit Headlines
Texas’s Moving Image Industry Incentive Program has gotten most of the press over the past year — $1.5 billion in state incentives available through 2035, with rebates now reaching up to 31% of qualified in-state spending. But for producers deciding where to base a project, the more consequential development is what’s now being built on the ground. Central and North Texas are in the middle of a genuine soundstage construction boom, and that physical infrastructure is what turns a tax credit into a place where a production can actually operate long-term.
What’s Actually Under Construction
The scale of the build-out is worth spelling out. In Bastrop, Line 204 Studios is planning an eight-stage campus spread across 600 acres, backed by an initial $50 million investment. In San Marcos, Hill Country Studios is preparing to break ground on a 12-stage, 800,000-square-foot production complex aimed at large-scale streaming and studio projects. And in Fort Worth, developer Hillwood has leased nearly 450,000 square feet at its AllianceTexas development to Taylor Sheridan’s production company, which is now running eight soundstages there for the Paramount series “Landman” and other projects. These aren’t announcements — they’re active campuses that are already changing where episodic and feature work gets based in the state.
Sprawling Campuses Change What an Aerial Unit Is Booked For
A soundstage cluster on 600 or 800,000 square feet of land isn’t just an interior shooting location — it’s a property that productions will want documented and marketed from above, from campus establishing shots for a studio’s own promotional material to exterior backlot work that uses the surrounding acreage as a standing set. That’s a different aerial brief than the tight urban lots producers are used to booking in Los Angeles, and it rewards a vendor who can plan a shoot around a large, open footprint rather than a single building.
Open Land Doesn’t Mean No Homework
The instinct with rural and suburban Central Texas sites is to assume airspace and permitting will be simpler than a dense studio backlot or a downtown core, and in general that instinct is directionally right — open land away from major commercial airports carries less of the controlled-airspace complexity that defines a shoot in a market like Los Angeles or Las Vegas. But “simpler” isn’t “no process.” Producers should still confirm local county and city drone ordinances, check proximity to any regional or municipal airport, and get that answer before the shoot date, not assume it away because the location isn’t a major metro.
What This Means for Booking a Vendor Now
With three major campuses moving from announcement to active construction and production at roughly the same time, the aerial vendors who already have relationships and local knowledge in Bastrop, San Marcos, and Fort Worth are going to be the ones who can turn around a booking quickly as more projects land in these hubs. For producers scouting Texas for the first time, that local familiarity is worth asking about directly — a vendor who already knows a specific studio campus and its surrounding jurisdiction is a faster, more reliable booking than one learning the market on your production’s schedule.
