The Manhattan-born actor is among those who are leading a drive to ensure the city regains its status in the Hollywood pantheon.
Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II, and Jimmy ‘The Gent’ Conway in Goodfellas: They weren’t just indelible Robert De Niro characters, but also New Yorkers who elevated the city into a character all its own in the movies they inhabited.
But in the years since De Niro roamed the Big Apple’s streets in those roles, New York’s once distinctive mark on celluloid has faded. Now, the Manhattan-born actor and producer is working to ensure the city regains its status in the Hollywood pantheon.
De Niro just opened Wildflower Studios — an 11-sound-stage campus in Queens that cost about $1 billion — with his son Raphael and business partner Adam Gordon. Their aim: to bring a new level of technology to production in the city, where many studios are converted warehouses instead of purpose-built facilities.
“We came to this from a position of trying to be helpful and supportive for the city that we both love,” Gordon said about himself and De Niro. “We’re both fourth-generation New Yorkers.”
They’re far from alone as developers ramp up bets on studios in the area. Hallmark Channel founder Robert Halmi is in the process of wrapping construction on a 1 million-square-foot campus for his Great Point Studios in Yonkers. Blackstone Inc. and Vornado Realty Trust are building Sunset Pier 94 Studios, the first designated film studio in Manhattan, which is set to open next year by the Hudson River. East End Studios, a roughly 350,000-square-foot space, is slated for completion next year in Queens.
The boom is unfolding amid an entertainment-industry slowdown, even as a flood of new sound stages is in the pipeline globally. In New York, developers and producers are also seeking to capitalize on a recent boost to the state fund providing tax credits to film and television productions.
Governor Kathy Hochul last year increased funding to $700 million a year from $420 million, and made 30% of qualified production expenses tax deductible, up from 25%. The measure also accelerated the timeline for claiming credits and offered additional incentives for filming upstate. To qualify, productions are expected to shoot 75% in the state.
While critics have questioned the program’s cost and efficacy, supporters say it will level the playing field with other states such as Georgia, which established itself as a filming hub over the past decade.
“Momentum for film and TV in the city and the extension and expansion of the tax credit will certainly invite more business” to Sunset Pier 94, a Blackstone spokesperson said.
New York’s program is still less favorable than in Canada, where the tax credit can be 35% or more. Many productions film a few scenes in New York City to establish a setting while doing the rest of the work elsewhere. Producers and developers are now vying to bring in more full-time activity. Netflix Inc. opened a studio in Brooklyn in 2021.
“You can go somewhere else and get iconic New York for a few days. But we want them to come here. We want them to use our stages. We want them to hire our crews,” said Pat Kaufman, Commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment.
It’s been a bumpier ride than expected in some key ways. The industry was rocked by strikes, which shut down productions and dwindled pipelines before writers and actors returned to work late last year.
Separately, streaming services lost steam in 2022, contributing to a national downturn. Production around the country is down 40% from two years ago, according to ProdPro, an online platform that tracks the entertainment industry. Filming in Los Angeles plunged 12% in the second quarter from a year earlier, according to the local permit group FilmLA.
In New York City, the number of permits to shoot was down by almost 900 during the first six months of the year from 2019, though it’s up by more than 300 since last year, according to the mayor’s office.
That’s stirring concern over whether there will be enough demand to fill all the new production capacity. Kaufman Astoria Studios, which dates back to 1920 and offers over 500,000 square feet in production space, is busy but not full, said President Hal Rosenbluth.
“We became the flavor of the month during a period in which no one wanted to invest in commercial real estate,” he said of the studio building boom. “Are you going to get enough green-lit new productions to fill all this? That’s the interesting concern.”
Developers are wagering that new stages will be essential to meet the growing appetite for content as streaming recovers and new technology — such as massive LED video screens used for set design — makes production more sophisticated.
“We’re in a battle of the old versus the new,” said Halmi of Great Point Studios. “The stuff that the streamers put on air is much bigger than what was put on CBS, NBC and ABC 10 years ago. The scope is larger, the budgets are bigger, the shooting days are longer, the needs are greater.”
The influx of new sound stages heralds more competition and pricing pressure for existing studios. But established players say the newcomers are likely to face a learning curve.
“People are in for a rude awakening who are getting into the business for the first time,” said Doug Steiner of Steiner Studios, citing a demanding clientele and the inconsistency of short-term leases. “People get wooed by the glamor.”
Still, the studio is one of the only New York City spaces at full capacity, and Steiner is spending $93 million to add two stages to its 30-sound-stage campus in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The real estate developer will also break ground on a $550 million facility several miles away in Sunset Park. The expansions are part of a long-term development plan, he said.
Steiner’s plans underscore New York’s long history with the filming industry, which the new studios want to expand on. The Better Sister, starring Elizabeth Banks and Jessica Biel and backed by Amazon MGM Studios, is among several new productions shooting in the city. So is Étoile, from Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
A back lot in Los Angeles doesn’t always do the trick, said Jonathan Tolins, showrunner of Elsbeth, a spinoff from The Good Wife that’s shooting its second season. Its New York locale is a big part of the show — much like in many of De Niro’s great roles.
“If you really want to feel like you’re in New York,” said Tolins, “you have to be here.”