Delaware has all the raw materials for a thriving film industry: diverse landscapes, a prime East Coast location, and a growing community of local filmmakers. Yet for years, the state lacked the policy infrastructure to keep pace with its neighbors. While Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey offered competitive film tax incentives, Delaware watched jobs and production spending go elsewhere.
The CREATE Plan identified modernizing Delaware’s film and media industry as a top economic priority. Audiovisual and interactive media accounts for 32.6% of the creative economy’s total Gross Value Add and generates $851.9 million in direct output. This is the highest of any sector in Delaware’s creative ecosystem, even though it makes up just 11% of its total creative economy assets. As the CREATE Plan highlights, Delaware features a higher concentration of audiovisual businesses than the national average, but they tend to be smaller operations. It is a sector primed for growth with the right institutional support.
This summer, Delaware moved to close that gap with the passage of House Bill 364 (HB364), establishing the Delaware Entertainment Production Tax Credit. The law creates a 30% transferable tax credit for qualifying film, TV, esports, and digital media productions, featuring a $100,000 minimum spend threshold and a $10 million annual program cap.
For Neil Kirschling, Executive Director of the Delaware Arts Alliance, HB364 is proof that the CREATE Plan’s research is translating into action.
“Advocates have been calling for years for a film incentive in Delaware, and it’s exciting that we finally have one now in law,” Kirschling said. “That’s thanks in large part to years of advocacy work, and to Governor Meyer picking this up and putting it in his recommended budget. The plan recommends that we have film incentives, and it’s a way for us as a state to really comprehensively support this industry coming to Delaware and build on what exists.”
Kiandra Parks, a filmmaker and professor of mass media and visual and performing arts at Delaware State University, has spent a decade watching for this moment.
“Since I’ve been back in 2015, I noticed that there was a void in Delaware — Delaware being one of the only states in the region that does not have film incentives, which means that commercial film production doesn’t happen in the state of Delaware,” she said. “And I was contacted by a group of film enthusiasts, and we created some ideas for legislation to get passed to bring film production, commercial film and television productions to the state of Delaware. And in the last five years it has picked up speed, and we are happy to see the strides that the Film Commission and the tax incentives have made in the state of Delaware.”
For local filmmaker Benjamin Wagner, the timing has been personal. His documentary Friends and Neighbors premiered on PBS in May 2026, just ahead of the new incentive’s rollout.
“It has meant nothing practically for me,” he said. “My film wouldn’t have probably qualified because it was, frankly, below the threshold.” Still, Wagner credits the state for trying to help however it could: “I did have a number of great conversations with Joe Zilcosky of the Division of Small Business of the state, who really, to his credit, tried to find a way to have the state sponsor… my film. I can’t emphasize enough how hard he went to battle for me.”
Wagner is optimistic about what the new law makes possible.
“A thriving Delaware film industry means a steady pipeline of production,” he said. “It means local crews getting hired. It means production houses getting used. It means restaurants being full of hip, cool people talking about art. It also means a film commission that’s transparent, that’s engaged, that’s accessible, that’s telling the story of the state.”
He sees the opportunity in economic terms as much as creative ones.
“The impact could be significant — local actors, local shooters, local caterers, local drivers, builders, equipment people, vendors, hotels, restaurants,” he said. “There’s all this sort of halo effect around any given production that I think could help rise the tide around all of us.”
But both Parks and Wagner agree the credit only pays off if the people benefiting from it are Delawareans.
“If there is not any training or education for the people who live in this state, then the money that productions are spending, if they were to come here, is going to go to people that are trained and come from outside of the state,” Parks said. “So it’s a two-part deal. We get the money that’s coming in, but we also need to have training and workforce development so that people can fill those jobs when they come.”
Parks already has a model in mind for what that training could look like.
“Connecting young high school students that want to go into the film industry with union members and union training,” she said. “I know that there is a theater union for people that build sets for theater productions, like the Delaware Theater Company. So can we borrow from those industries and those resources to sort of build a community of filmmakers and artisans and electricians and set builders and designers.”
Wagner sees the same opportunity from the filmmaking side, and attracting outside productions is only half of it. The other half, he says, is developing homegrown talent.
“I appreciate endeavoring to get Los Angeles and New York interested in this state as a production opportunity — that’s sort of top-down,” he said. “But I also think we need to think about this bottom-up opportunity, where we’re growing local talent to export to become Hollywood and New York, but be here.”
Wagner also thinks Delaware needs to define “film” broadly to make good on that promise.
“There’s a whole bunch of different ways to tell a story — not on a screen that’s 16 by 9 or IMAX, but on a screen that fits in my hand,” he said. “Two of the biggest films of the summer started on YouTube. So if we’re just resourcing feature-length films, I think we’re hamstringing generations of future Scorseses or Gerwigs.”
Kirschling agrees the incentives are only the beginning of what it will take to support the state’s growing film industry.
“These incentives are in place from now until 2030, and we’re hopeful the reports coming out of that period will show the economic value they’re bringing to the state,” Kirschling said. “But we want to make the case for additional supports for the film sector, too. Other states have put a film incentive in place as the bedrock, and then they’re also standing up film offices dedicated to the customer service work — permits, sound ordinances, connecting productions with vendors and talent, walking them through the regulatory side. They’ve also built databases of film locations and local talent that make those connections easy. Delaware is definitely well-positioned to build all of that on top of these incentives.”
The CREATE Plan emphasizes that the tax credit is only the first step. What comes next is the half of the equation Parks and Wagner are both pointing to: assistance programs to help productions hire and train local crews, a comprehensive database of film-ready locations, a modernized Film Commission built for how stories are made and distributed today, and the staff and funding to run it.
“I can go to LA, I can go to New York. I’ve been around the world making films,” Parks said, “but it’s different when you can come home and see those same sorts of infrastructure and resources in place to tell stories. I hope that this isn’t just a dream, that it isn’t just people talking about what could be, but that it happens and that we are able to tell our own story here in Delaware.”