AB 2319, California’s first standalone tax credit for post-production work, passed the State Senate 65-2 on August 30 and now sits on Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk. He has until September 30 to sign or veto it. Unlike the state’s existing production tax credit, this one was written specifically for editors, colorists, sound mixers, VFX artists, and composers — the people whose jobs don’t require a single day of filming in California to exist, and who’ve been watching that work leave the state for a decade regardless.
What the Credit Actually Covers
AB 2319 offers a 35% base credit on qualified post-production expenses, with uplifts pushing it as high as 50% for out-of-zone work, resident labor, and music scoring. The eligible categories read like an actual post house’s invoice: picture editing, sound editing and mixing, Foley, ADR, music editing and composition, visual effects, color correction, and mastering. The mechanism that makes it different from California’s main production incentive is the part that matters most: a project doesn’t need to have filmed in the state, or even have qualified for the existing Film and TV Tax Credit, to bring its post work here and claim this one. If it’s signed, the program takes effect January 1, 2027.
Why the Editors Guild Wrote It This Way
The bill is co-sponsored by the Motion Picture Editors Guild (IATSE Local 700), whose president F. Hudson Miller testified for it before the legislature, alongside Karen Baker Landers of the California Post Alliance. The Guild’s own framing of the problem is blunt: California’s incentive structure had “a critical gap” that let a film shoot in Georgia or Vancouver, claim that state’s production credit, and then also take its editing, mixing, and color work somewhere else entirely, with California getting none of it. The Guild points to New York’s Eastern Region membership growing while California’s contracted over six years as the concrete cost of leaving that gap open.
Assemblymember Nick Schultz (D-Burbank), the bill’s author, put the stakes in plainer terms: “By signing AB 2319, Governor Newsom will literally save jobs here in Los Angeles and across the state.” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass backed the bill with a letter noting that “post-production and the jobs it creates is at the core of the entertainment industry, but it doesn’t qualify for our expanded Film and TV Tax Credit — that must change.” City Councilman Adrin Nazarian tied it to the broader anxiety running through the industry right now: “California must protect the full production pipeline to Keep Hollywood Home.”
A Real Program, Not Yet a Funded One
The catch is sized appropriately to California’s budget mood. Schultz originally floated $100 million a year for the credit; legislators funded it at $10 million to start. Schultz’s own assessment of that number was matter-of-fact rather than triumphant: “While $10 million may not be enough, it is a good starting point.” Even that more modest figure isn’t locked into the state’s roughly $352 billion budget, which operates under strict no-deficit rules — Newsom’s signature would create the legal mechanism for the credit, not automatically the appropriation behind it. That’s a meaningful gap between a bill becoming law and a colorist actually being able to bank a rebate for grading a film that shot in Toronto or Atlanta.
None of that undercuts why the industry’s craft unions pushed this hard for something this small. A post-production-specific credit is a genuinely new category in California’s incentive toolkit, aimed squarely at work that doesn’t show up in a location scout’s report but keeps an editing bay running in Burbank instead of Vancouver. Whether $10 million turns into a real line item or stays a symbolic first step depends on a budget fight that hasn’t happened yet. For now, the more immediate deadline is the one sitting on the governor’s desk, and everyone who cuts, mixes, or grades for a living in Los Angeles is watching the same calendar.
Sources:
MyNewsLA — “Film Post-Production Workers and Bass Urge Newsom to Sign New Tax Credit Bill”
Motion Picture Editors Guild (IATSE Local 700) — “AB 2319: The California Post-Production Tax Credit”
Mix — “California Post Production Tax Incentives Pass”
Deadline — “CA Post Production Tax Incentive Bill Passes Senate; Moves To Newsom’s Desk”
Martin Cid Magazine — “California Moves to Bring VFX Jobs Home, but Its Post-Production Credit Reaches Newsom Unfunded”
