Ontario film industry takes $1 billion hit, but domestic productions remain strong

Ontario’s film industry was down $1 billion in 2023, according to new figures released by the province.

While Ontario had been hitting record-high numbers of productions in recent years, the 2023 decline was driven by the months-long actors and writers strike in the U.S. This led to Ontario’s film and TV space bringing in $1.8 billion last year compared to $3.1 billion in 2022.

Overall, the number of foreign productions in the province — around 102 — wasn’t actually a major drop from the year prior, but it was the more than 50 percent cut in spending that made the impact more pronounced.

Still, domestic productions continued to hold strong, accounting for about $948 million — or more than half — of this sector’s economic benefit in 2023. In total, Ontario was home to 302 domestic productions last year, consisting of 52 feature films, 138 television series and 112 TV movies, miniseries and specials. That’s roughly on par with the 316 domestic productions that took place in 2022.

In particular, a variety of romance and holiday movies are filmed in Ontario; Hallmark alone released over 40 festive flicks last year, and many of them were shot in the province. Recent acclaimed Canadian films like BlackBerry, I Like Movies, Brother and Humane were also all filmed around Ontario.

Meanwhile, many major foreign companies continue to invest in the province, including Amazon, who began operating a massive production hub in Toronto earlier this year. Further, celebrated filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water) and Toronto native David Cronenberg (A History of Violence) prefer to shoot most of their films in the province, including the upcoming Frankenstein and The Shrouds, respectively. Trap, the next thriller from M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense), also generated buzz earlier this month for its recognizable Ontario filming locations.

That’s to say nothing of all of the recent American TV productions in Ontario, including Amazon’s The Boys, Gen V and Reacher, Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy and Ginny & Georgia and Paramount’s Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Star Trek: Discovery. 

It should be noted that domestic productions could be halted in the coming months, as the Writers Guild of Canada recently voted to authorize a strike for the first time in its 32-year history. The guild is calling for increased pay, greater protections against AI and minimum staffing in writers’ rooms. However, negotiations with the Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA) are still underway, so there’s no guarantee at this time that a strike will happen.

Image credit: Prime Video