Show stoppers: once a star performer in the U.S. film industry, North Carolina is now more of a bit player.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: NC TREND: Economic incentives

In the ethereal world of the film business, the production vans and catering trucks plying Charlotte's Plaza-Midwood neighborhood and several others earlier this year represented a tangible success. American Animals, a bank-robbery tale, might be eligible for up to $1.7 million from the state's $30 million annual kitty used to lure movie and television productions. "It has a United Kingdom production company/' says Guy Gaster, director of FilmNC, the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina's film-promotion office in Cary. "We recruited it out of Europe."

The movie, along with an Audi car commercial and the second season of Good Behavior, a television series airing on the TNT network that is being shot in Wilmington, could spend more than $46 million in North Carolina and generate 2,700 short-term jobs this year.

Unfortunately, there isn't much else going in the state's once-soaring fantasy industry three years after the North Carolina General Assembly gutted a more generous incentives plan.

"The first question we're typically asked when someone has a potential project in North Carolina is, 'What kind of incentives do you offer?'" Gaster says. "As great as our production talent is, as beautiful as our locations are, the industry is still driven by the dollar. It's mobile, and at the end of the day, they are trying to make as much money as possible. It's a business, after all."

Even vaunted infrastructure such as Wilmington's 50-acre EUE / Screen Gems Studios, the largest outside California, and a large pool of trained production workers can't compete with raw money, says Johnny Griffin, director of the city's Regional Film Commission. "We have soundstages here they can go right into, designed specifically for building sets and shooting projects, but they'll go to Georgia and operate out of a warehouse because incentives make it work for them," he says. "You're talking millions of dollars."

State lawmakers in 2014 scrapped North Carolina's film incentive plan that went into effect almost a decade earlier, with tax credits refunding as much as 25% of a project's cost. At the industry's peak in 2012, production companies were spending more than $375 million in the state, almost half coming that year from the Iron Man 3 flick starring Robert Downey Jr. (It eventually took in more than $1.2 billion at the box office.) In the last two years, producers have put up less than $150 million annually, putting at risk the state's status as a...