Caesars Entertainment has opened a 48,000-square-foot soundstage near the Las Vegas Strip?reportedly the largest in North America?in a bid to lure movie and TV producers to the casino capital.
“This gives (production companies) an opportunity to film shows that don’t necessarily have Las Vegas in the script,” Jason Gastwirth, senior vice president of marketing and entertainment for the gaming giant, said on a recent tour of the new facility with the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Located behind Bally’s in what looks like a huge white tent and measuring roughly the size of a football field, Caesars Entertainment Studios, as it’s called, surpasses in size the 45,900-square-foot Mega Stage at Pinewood Toronto Studios, which had laid claim to the largest on the continent.
Complete with makeup and dressing rooms it is already the scene of early taping for the first of six episodes of the popular “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” TV game show.
Gastwirth said there are “a number of other productions in the pipeline,” and it’s expected the facility will be booked “most of the year”.
But how effectively it will compete with the hundreds of similar facilities nationwide, including some 300 in and around Los Angeles alone, remains to be seen.
“At the end of the day, it is just a big box and you can rent them all over the country. People are lured by the size of the tax incentive,” Talaat Captan, an LA producer and studio owner, told the Review-Journal.
Southern Nevada, which is home to about a dozen studios, offers 15 to 20 percent tax breaks capped at $10 million. In contrast, neighboring Utah’s and New Mexico’s range as high as 30 percent with caps at upwards of $50 million.
