Santa Fe is counting on filmmaking to boost economy with midtown redevelopment. Will it pay off? | Local News

In December, Santa Fe city councilors approved the sale of key real estate in the heart of midtown to a company now developing the largest film studio in Northern New Mexico.

The move, which involves merging the midtown campus’s Garson Studios with Midtown Santa Fe’s adjacent property to create the massive Aspect Media Village, illustrated how officials in the capital city believe filmmaking will be a sustainable economic engine for years to come. The city sold the property for about $5 million to a film studio planning six soundstages, plus some affordable housing.

But in a business characterized by peaks, nadirs and periods in between, there is at least some risk in betting on the film industry’s lasting economic impact, particularly as Santa Fe faces an enduring affordable housing crisis. 

Phillip Gesue, developer of the Aspect Media Village project, believes the model will be successful. Still, he’s well-aware of the current slowdown and industry contractions that have made courting productions challenging in recent months. 

“It’s been slow,” Gesue said. “We are cautiously optimistic that the second half of 2025, and hopefully 2026 and coming years, will be more back to normal and robust,” he added. 

“I think that things will pick back up. I’m not sure they will pick back up to the level they were at in 2022, 2023,” said Gesue, noting his company, PE Real Estate, is investing about $100 million in the redevelopment. “But even if we don’t go back to that level, we may be at the level we were at a couple of years before, which is perfectly sustainable.”

A cultural destination and arts hub that can guarantee hundreds of sunny days a year, Santa Fe continues to top the lists of places to film, including earlier this year, when MovieMaker Magazine again named it North America’s best small city or town for filmmakers.

Santa Fe has always been a cinema town, hosting screenings when film was in its infancy at movie houses downtown. And Northern New Mexico has long laid claim to being a place where films are made, from the perennially popular genre of cowboy cinema — Santa Fe County boasts seven Western sets alone — to Marvel Universe’s Thor in 2011.

John Wayne donned a Stetson and played a rugged rancher in The Cowboys (1972), filmed in part in Galisteo and at a ranch in Lamy. In 2007’s 3:10 to Yuma — starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale — local viewers might recognize Santa Fe Indian School. Academy Award winners No Country for Old Men in 2007 and Oppenheimer in 2023 filmed locally as well.

Overall, Santa Fe County typically gets around 30% of the moviemaking in the state.

The city of Santa Fe and Santa Fe County share a joint office devoted to the film industry. Each contributed $175,000 to the office this fiscal year — an effort led by Santa Fe Film Commissioner Jennifer LaBar-Tapia, who was widely lauded last year for heading the capital city’s high-profile but ultimately unsuccessful bid to host the Sundance Film Festival starting in 2027. 

But while the industry has proven to be a strong economic driver over the years in Santa Fe, the local movie business has not been immune to the dip in the production for the industry as a whole. 

Film and television production levels declined by 20% globally in the second quarter of 2024, while the U.S. saw a sharper 40% decline from pre-strike levels, according to Entertainment Partners, a production management and finance company.

Between the years 2019 and 2023, the total five-year spending on film production in Santa Fe County was just over $804 million, according to the state Film Office, accounting for about 25% of the statewide industry spending over that period.

In 2023, the latest year production tallies are available, 14 productions were done within the county, down from 26 in 2022 but up from 12 productions in 2021 and 13 in 2020; according to data from the New Mexico Film Office, 26 productions were shot in 2019.

LaBar-Tapia noted that there have been stretches of time — in 2021 and 2022 —  where film infrastructure, such as soundstages, could not be built fast enough. Now local film ranches in Santa Fe County sit empty, waiting for their next project. 

“So now, we do have studios sitting empty,” LaBar-Tapia said. “And some of the other states that have built studios, they are sitting empty because of what is going on right now in the United States and the fact that a lot of the productions are going overseas.”

But LaBar-Tapia believes things will come back and that the summer months will mark a better period. She said Aspect Media Village will be a huge asset to the local industry. 

“These conversations [about midtown redevelopment] wouldn’t be happening if there was a thought it wouldn’t get back to a high level, the peaks we’re used to,” LaBar-Tapia said. “It’s quieter than we’d like it, but we have faith it’s going to be coming back.”

The midtown proposition is a massive deal in Santa Fe filmmaking, the sale itself shows the councilors recognize the economic potential of the local industry, said Gay Dillingham, a local filmmaker who chairs the Santa Fe Film and Digital Media Council. 

“The city council vote was unanimous in the end, which I think shows that the city understands the importance of film and digital media in our community,” Dillingham said. She added, “There’s definitely a slowdown everywhere, but that said, all the more reason to support this effort at Midtown because we’ve got to make sure it succeeds. 

The Aspect Media Village is being developed at the city-owned midtown campus, the former home of the College of Santa Fe and the Santa Fe University of Art and Design. But the project does not span the entire campus. 

Midtown Santa Fe Productions has operated a studio in the neighboring Shellaberger Tennis Center since late 2022 after Gesue’s company, PE Real Estate, purchased the facility for $6.7 million. The Aspect Media Village will merge the midtown campus’s Garson Studios with Midtown Santa Fe’s adjacent property to create the village on more than 20 acres.

Plans also call for 250 residential units, 100 of them workforce housing units, a restaurant and movie theater, along with the film production facilities. Under the terms of the deal approved in December, Gesue is paying the city $5 million for the property in several increments, as well as $30,000 a year for a 10-year lease. He will also be obligated to fulfill a list of other conditions.

“We started reaching out months before we were closed [on the deal] trying to attract big productions here because it’s critical,” Gesue added. “Big productions bring us business and they are the ones that bring us jobs.”

Northern New Mexico is home to several well-known film production locations, some outside the city limits like the Bonanza Creek Ranch, which has caught Hollywood’s attention since the 1950s. In total, Santa Fe County had nine state-recognized qualified production facilities as of 2023, according to the New Mexico Film Office. 

The region offers a range of topographical diversity, with landscapes that have been used to mimic locations well beyond the bounds of New Mexico, such as the Middle East. Stanley, a little community northeast of Edgewood with a movie ranch on the state’s list of qualified production facilities, is known for looking a lot like West Texas. 

While local soundstages and ranches are counting on business to ramp up again, a policy enacted in recent years attempting to direct industry dollars to areas of New Mexico beyond the hubs of Albuquerque and Santa Fe has also taken shape. 

To increase productions statewide, a 10% “Rural Uplift” tax credit is available for productions that film in areas at least 60 miles from Santa Fe and Albuquerque city halls, on top of other incentives in the existing tax credit structure.

“We’ve seen productions in Roswell. We’ve seen work in Hobbs. We’ve seen a lot of work on the pueblos with Dark Winds,” said Rob Black, the state’s Economic Department secretary. “So we think that Rural Uplift has been very helpful in driving that.”

Some of the rationale for the policy is rooted in the fact that it can be particularly expensive to shoot outside of the Santa Fe and Albuquerque corridor because of housing and other constraints. 

LaBar-Tapia has strong feelings on this, noting that while she understands the premise of the policy in terms of bolstering rural communities, she feels as if rural areas within 60 miles of Santa Fe, such as Española and Pecos, could benefit from the incentive but do not currently qualify. 

“Depending on what street you are on in Las Vegas, it wipes out part of Vegas,” LaBar-Tapia said. “It wipes out from Santa Fe up to [the Taos area], so all these truly rural communities that can maybe benefit from film production coming in for a couple of days are getting knocked out of [consideration for the incentive].”

“We get it, because Santa Fe and Albuquerque do get a majority of the filming in the state,” LaBar-Tapia said. “If you’re going to call it a rural uplift, it needs to support rural communities all around us.”