Income taxes: credit: qualified motion pictures.

The Personal Income Tax Law and the Corporation Tax Law allow various credits against the taxes imposed by those laws, including a credit against those taxes for taxable years beginning on or after January 1, 2011, in an amount equal to a specified percentage of the qualified expenditures, as defined, attributable to the production of a qualified motion picture in California, or, where the qualified motion picture has relocated to California or is an independent film, as provided. Existing law defines qualified a motion picture to include a feature with a minimum production budget of $1,000,000 and a maximum production budget of $75,000,000. Existing law imposes specified duties on the California Film Commission related to the administration of the credits, including a requirement to allocate the tax credits until July 1, 2017, and limits the aggregate amount of credits that may be allocated to qualified motion pictures in any fiscal year to $100,000,000, through the 2016–17 fiscal year. This bill would expand the definition of qualified motion pictures by removing the cap on the production budget for feature films and limit the amount of qualified expenditures, for purposes of the qualified motion pictures that are features, to $75,000,000. This bill would additionally revise the amount of credits allocated per fiscal year to provide that a minimum threshold is met for allocations to specified qualified motion pictures. This bill would include a change in state statute that would result in a taxpayer paying a higher tax within the meaning of Section 3 of Article XIIIA of the California Constitution, and thus would require for passage the approval of 23 of the membership of each house of the Legislature. This bill would take effect immediately as a tax levy.