The Kentucky Film Office recently launched its new website, creating an information resource for companies hoping to bring productions to the commonwealth.
Kentucky Film Office executive director Meg Fister was hired to run the revamped office in January, after the state legislature passed priority legislation last year to establish it. She said the new site will help the state further capitalize on its growing momentum in the entertainment industry in recent years.
“We had had an incentive program under Gov. Steve Beshear. The program went away. All of that growth kind of got hit hard. It came back under [Gov. Andy Beshear and now] we're seeing the growth again,” Fister said. “I just wanted to find a way to say that Kentucky is real. It's a real partner, it's a trustworthy partner. We're here to stay, and we have all of our information transparent to producers and to companies, so that they know that they can take it to the bank.”
The website – which launched July 1 – advertises the Kentucky Entertainment Incentive program as “one of the most attractive film incentive programs in the country,” with a fully refundable tax credit of up to 30 to 35% of production budgets. The KEI program is capped at $75 million per year, which the site calls one of the top 10 largest caps in the U.S.
The site also houses a database of locations and vendors in the state and a directory of in-state crew workers and vendors, which Fister said gives productions an idea of the types of setting, props, workers and vendors that can be found in Kentucky. Both tools also allow people to add themselves or their properties to the database.
Fister said one of the main reasons the office created the locations database is to show production companies the range of scenery Kentucky has to offer.
“I tell producers all the time, [Kentucky] can basically be anything other than the desert, and we have sound stages that can be the desert for you,” she said. “I think we get kind of generalized as just the South, and I think people who aren't from here, who have never been here, don't even know where to put us on a map and don't understand that we have such a unique cultural offering that is different than just the general South.”
Moving forward, Fister hopes to diversify the state’s production interests by building up a workforce that can keep Kentucky competitive and showcasing not only the state but its residents.
“What I would love to see in the next few years is more productions that actually use Kentucky as the location that identify and tell Kentucky stories,” she said. “That could be in finding Kentucky creators and uplifting those makers, but then it's also in finding, like, our “Nashville” series, our “CSI: New Orleans” … identifiable shows that help on a global scale [to] really let Kentucky shape what Kentucky is.”
Aiming at smaller targets, Fister said, could help the Kentucky Film Office sustain the state’s film industry.
“So it's not [about] going out swinging and saying, ‘Hey, we only want to have two Marvel productions here every year that then take our entire incentive, and there's no other work being done,’” she said. “What I would love for Kentucky to do is to be synonymous and king of the indie market, because indie features and indie series are what's being made on the global scale."
In recent years, Kentucky’s entertainment tax incentive program has helped bring projects like Netflix’s Ted Bundy biopic “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” and Ethan Hawke’s “Wildcat,” which tells the life story of author Flannery O’Connor, to the Bluegrass State. It has also helped bring touring Broadway productions to places like The Carson Center in far western Kentucky, where crews have conducted technical rehearsals for lengthy touring productions.
Fister said, with the help of a bill passed earlier this year, the Kentucky Film Office is now helping to bring not only movies, television series, industrial films and Broadway shows, but also commercial shoots, music videos and video game productions to the state. She said the move is one that shores up the Bluegrass State’s entertainment industry by creating more jobs for Kentuckians.
“I'm trying to help create that kind of market here that will be sustainable for us … so that [our crew base is] working consistently throughout the year,” she said. “They're growing their skills. They're moving up. We're training new people. I want that pipeline to be in a place that's comfortable, and doesn't explode and then implode.”
So far in 2026, Fister said, more than $50 million of this year’s KEI cap has been awarded. Those funds are going to support productions of things like “Debutantes,” a horror film being shot in Paducah this month; a touring Broadway production of “Waitress” in Owensboro; and a documentary about “Danke Schoen” singer Wayne Newton, among many other projects.
The legislative changes made in recent years have had a big impact on the number of incentives applications. Before the film incentive program and the state’s film office had a dedicated website, Fister said a typical year before the Kentucky Film Office’s formal creation saw “eight to 15 inquiries” about the KEI program. But this year’s renewed push, she said, has already generated “three times” that in just six months.
