by Brendan Faber
Walk onto a soundstage in Wellington and you’re as likely to find a Marvel unit as a local short. That’s been the pattern since Peter Jackson proved a small country at the bottom of the world could carry three Lord of the Rings films and win Oscars doing it. Weta Digital and Weta Workshop turned a garage operation into the effects house studios call when they need something no one else can build, and the list of productions that have since landed in Auckland and Wellington reads like a locations scout’s fantasy: Avatar, Mulan, The Rings of Power, The Minecraft Movie. More than 150 major series and features have filmed there since 2020 alone.
What gets missed in the “New Zealand as backlot” story is that the incentive structure behind it keeps changing to chase smaller, more frequent productions rather than just the occasional blockbuster. The government cut the minimum spend threshold on the New Zealand Screen Production Rebate from $15 million to $4 million, a shift the New Zealand Film Commission has been actively promoting to mid-budget international projects that would never have qualified before. That’s not a rounding error. It’s the difference between chasing three Avatar-sized productions a decade and hosting dozens of smaller international shoots every year, each one bringing crews who need somewhere to spend their evenings and their money.
A Country Built for More Than One Kind of Entertainment
That’s where the country’s domestic entertainment scene comes in, and it’s been catching up fast. Wellington and Auckland have spent the last few years building out everything from streaming production hubs to a genuinely competitive online gambling market, both aimed at the same audience: visiting crews with disposable income and nowhere obvious to spend a Tuesday night, plus a local population that’s increasingly comfortable doing its entertainment spending on a phone rather than a night out. Anyone actually comparing options for online casinos in New Zealand right now will find a market that’s grown considerably more competitive over the past two years, with operators fighting harder on game selection and payout speed than they did when the sector was smaller and less scrutinised.
It mirrors what’s happening in sport, where New Zealand keeps producing outsized talent for a country of five million people. Liam Lawson’s rise to a Formula 1 seat is the most visible current example — a driver from a country with no F1 circuit of its own, doing to global motorsport roughly what Jackson did to Hollywood filmmaking three decades earlier. Small country, disproportionate output, and an audience back home that follows every lap the same way they queue for opening night at a local multiplex.
The Stories Aren’t Just Imported Anymore
None of this works if New Zealand stays a country other people’s productions pass through rather than one that makes its own. That’s the part the “stand-in for Hollywood” framing leaves out. Whina, the biopic of Māori leader Dame Whina Cooper, opened across virtually every multiplex and arthouse screen in the country earlier this year, drawing crowds that rivalled the international blockbusters shot a few suburbs over. Co-director Paula Whetu Jones has spoken about the nine years it took to get the film made and the reach Whina still commands decades after her death — more than a million people watched her funeral broadcast in 1994. That’s a domestic entertainment industry with its own gravity, not a satellite of someone else’s.
The same pattern shows up wherever you look at how New Zealanders spend their downtime — streaming apps, NZ casino sites, local sport — all of it more competitive and better built than it was five years ago. The soundstages in Wellington will keep hosting the next Avatar sequel. But the more interesting story for anyone watching this market closely is what New Zealand is building when the cameras from Los Angeles eventually pack up and go home.
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