Film and TV Spending Dropped In New Mexico. But There’s a Silver Lining

The Land of Enchantment may be an ideal case study for the production spending boom that fueled the Peak TV and Streaming Wars eras in Hollywood — as well as the dramatic pull back that occurred after the dual actors’ and writers’ strikes hit the industry in 2023.

New Mexico, the home of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul , saw growth in studio spending during the prestige cable years and stocked up on its share of series (including multiple seasons of blockbuster Stranger Things ) after Netflix picked Albuquerque for a major production hub in 2018. During the early pandemic years, as Netflix’s rivals tried (and failed) to emulate its playbook to compete in a scale game for subscribers, the state also was a beneficiary.

Vince Gilligan brought his Apple TV series Pluribus to New Mexico and AMC has now wrapped filming on five seasons of its detective drama Dark Winds, while Christopher Nolan shot his Oscar best picture winner Oppenheimer on-location in Los Alamos. More recently, Netflix’s Western romance Ransom Canyon has used the state as a backdrop for Texas Hill Country over the course of multiple seasons.

But since the strikes, studios have generally cut back on big-ticket productions, especially in the scripted TV space, across the board. That retrenchment hit lots of markets, including California, but New Mexico saw a particularly notable drop in production spending. For the past two years, producer Steve Graham ( Walker: Independence , Black Summer ) has led the New Mexico Film Office, working with studio partners to manage this transition to a new normal. That also includes attracting more commercial and post-production work as well as microdramas going forward. Graham spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about the major trendlines, as “we’re in the middle of a change in the way the industry is working.”

“Every studio has reached out and many of them have scouted in the summer for projects that could be fall or spring,” Graham adds. “So I’m very encouraged at what’s coming up.”

New Mexico saw multiple boom periods where film and TV production spend grew considerably in classic Peak TV years and then also during the Streaming Wars era up until 2022. What were factors fueling those growth times?

Our peak years were in 2019 and 2022, I believe, on either side of the pandemic. And we enjoyed a lot of growth during peak TV, as did a lot of other places domestically. I think the advantage we had during that period is we had a good running start, as our incentive had brought quite a bit of production to New Mexico. So we were just in a great spot to be able to grow and to add to our infrastructure, which meant that as we increasingly saw competition from other states, we already had the crew, we already had production facilities and things like that.