Why does Bollywood Favour London? | Business | Sarthak Ahuja - Video

Do you know why so many Bollywood movies are shot in London?... It’s not because UK is pretty, but because of a secret tax hack...

The UK has a Film Tax Relief Scheme by which if a movie spends on shooting the movie in the UK, then over 20% of the expenses incurred are refunded to movie producers...

There is no threshold of a minimum amount of spend (other than 10% of the movie’s budget)... and just that the movie should pass the UK Culture Test...

What is that test?

Well, it’s quite vague, and even showing the Big Ben, the Union Jack, red phone booths, or showing a few British characters would enable movies to pass the test.

This is done to incentivise film producers to shoot foreign films in the UK rather than any other country.

I can imagine movies like Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, Housefull 3, and Cocktail could have benefited from the scheme...

And UK is not the only country doing this... Malta is a hot favourite too, which offers breaks of up to 40% of the expense incurred there on movie production... because of which UK has recently increased its tax relief to keep itself competitive...

Another condition is that the UK should have co-production rights of the film, and such clauses are governed under the UK co-production treaty, which UK has signed with India as well.

Now again, not everyone who shoots in London does it because of the tax break... UK also has a glamorous aspiration attached to the minds of the Indian audiences... but it helps.

Other countries that give such breaks are New Zealand, Canada, Australia, Germany and South Korea.

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While India has no such tax rebates, it benefits from low production costs, but we still don’t have international producers come here to shoot.

Maybe individual state governments could start off by incentivizing social media creators to post about the tourism in their state... either through brand collaborations or just boosting their visibility on government owned channels.

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A Chartered Accountant with about 10 years of experience in areas of Tax Advisory, Startup Consulting, Fundraising, Audits, Deal Advisory, Business Modelling and contract CFO services.

Winner of the ISB Young Leader Award 2017 and the Best All Rounder, PGP Class of '17, Sarthak has also been published about in the leading financial newspapers such as The Financial Express as possibly the youngest Indian to have completed the courses of CA, CS and CMA along with a graduate degree in Financial & Investment Analysis from University of Delhi, all by the age of 23 years