BRITAIN IS BOOMING

HOLLYWOOD STUDIOS AND STREAMING DRAMAS HAVE BROUGHT RECORD INVESTMENT TO THE UK WITH ALL THE NATIONS AND REGIONS FEELING THE BENEFIT. CLIVE BULL REPORTS

BACK IN 2019, just prior to the COVID hiatus that led to studios falling silent across the globe, UK flm and TV production had hit new heights. It was a record-breaking year and then, suddenly, it all stopped as the industry grappled with the impact of the pandemic and established new protocols. But the downtime proved shortlived as production soon fred up again, in part driven by the pent-up demand for high-end TV from a growing number of streamers. And if 2021 was the bounce-back year for the UK, 2022 —according to the latest ofcial fgures — has been an extraordinary one. The BFI puts combined spend on flm and high-end TV for the year at £6.27bn — the highest ever reported — surpassing the pre-pandemic peak by £1.83bn.

The majority of the spend on flm production was inward investment. US-studio-backed flms included Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey17; the frst part of the flm adaptation of the musical Wicked ; the latest from the Fast & Furious franchise, Fast X; the Jason Statham thriller The Beekeeper; Alex Garland’s Civil War; Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two; and Magic Mike’s Last Dance.

High-end TV accounted for £4.29bn with productions including The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season two; House of The Dragon season two; Good Grief, from Schitt’s Creek creator Dan Levy; Apple TV’s Slow Horses season two; Netfix’s Treason, Bridgerton and season six of The Crown; period drama The Buccaneers; The Woman in the Wall; Top Boy, season fve; and Paramount+’s The Flatshare.

“It’s the biggest transformation I've ever seen in the industry,” says Adrian Wootton, chief executive of the British Film Commission and Film London. “I can remember back to

1985 and tumbleweed blowing through our studios. Everybody desperately trying to get people back in the cinema, trying to get people to come and shoot here and it's almost like a diferent world we're looking at over that 40-year period. But particularly since the 2007 flm tax credit and the increase to the tax credit in 2013, the growth cycle has just kept going up and up and up.”

That has led, Wootton says, to a new wave of investment in infrastructure. In London and the South East there has been an unprecedented increase in studio space which includes: the expansion of the iconic Shepperton Studios to provide approximately one million sq ft (93,000 sq m) of new production accommodation, thanks to a long-term deal with Netfix; the recently opened Wharf Studios in London suburbs Barking and Dagenham and the nearby Eastbrook Studios development — a 22-acre site with 12 sound stages; Shinfeld Studios in Reading, west of London, a new production hub that will eventually comprise 18 purpose built sound stages; Hollywood’s Sunset Studios £700m ($863m) project at Waltham Cross, north of London; and the £6m upgrade to Three Mills Studios in East London.

The capital itself is also proving a hugely popular backdrop for high-end TV dramas. Wootton cites “massively exciting television series like the Apple show Slow Horses which has got London absolutely in its DNA and is shooting in almost every part of London; and Bridgerton — period but, using that sort of alternative-version reality”.

Independent British flms are also choosing London as a setting. “The new flm Rye Lane is just fabulous. A kind of independent rom-com, backed by the BFI and the BBC, set in and around Brixton (south London), and it's like a visual love poem to London. So, flmmakers are clearly recognising that we have this vibrant, shifting, changing backdrop. We have the history, we have all of that in London, but there's also the contemporaneity. London's always evolving, always changing.”

But the increased investment and studio developments stretch much further than the capital. “We have now got not one, not two, but seven diferent production clusters around the UK, with infrastructure and the crew base also expanding. The expansion across not just London and the South East, but across the whole of the UK nations and regions, has been remarkable,” he says.

In Liverpool, the opening of The Depot, comprising two new purpose-built studios, has had a very positive impact on production in the area, according to Lynn Saunders, head of Liverpool Film Ofce. Paramount+ hired both units on a long lease for Sexy Beast. “In 2021 and 2022 in excess of £21m of inward investment was attracted into the Liverpool City Region and we expect 2023 to be higher still,” Saunders says. The Batman was the frst feature flm in the world to flm on location after COVID, bringing its 500 crew and 600 extras to Liverpool. “From then onwards the amount of high-end content hasn’t stopped. We have housed amazing dramas such as The Responder, The Ipcress File, The Tower (series one and two), Funny Woman, Maternal and Sexy Beast.”

One of the attractions of Liverpool is its ability to double for other cities around the globe. It has more recently stepped in for London (Sexy Beast, Cobra, Peaky Blinders, The Tower); New York (Fantastic Beasts, Florence Foster Jenkins, Captain America); Washington (The Crown); Philadelphia (Outlander); and Moscow (Jack Ryan).

It has been a similar story in Scotland where the postCOVID bounce-back has led to some of the busiest production levels in the country’s flming history, with a backlog of projects waiting to be made, new projects being commissioned and