“Jerseywood” Stops Being a Punchline the Day the Job Listings Go Up

Every few years somebody floats the idea that New Jersey is going to become a film capital, and every few years the rest of us roll our eyes, because we've heard it before. Fort Lee was the original Hollywood before Hollywood was Hollywood — the cliffhanger got its name from actual cliffs in Bergen County — and then the whole industry packed up and moved west in the 1910s and left us with nothing but trivia. So forgive me if I've spent the last decade treating "New Jersey film boom" the way I treat "this is the year the Sixers put it all together." Believe it when you see it. Well. I'm starting to see it.

Not planning to hire. Hiring.

The tell isn't the ribbon-cuttings or the press releases full of the word "state-of-the-art." The tell is that Netflix has started hiring at Fort Monmouth. Not planning to hire. Hiring. When a company stops talking about square footage and starts posting jobs, that's the moment a dream turns into a payroll. The Monmouth campus — a million-plus square feet, a dozen soundstages rising on a decommissioned Army base — isn't slated to fully open until 2028, but the workforce machine is already turning over.

And it's not just Netflix. Over in Bayonne, the 1888 Studios project is going up as the biggest campus-style production facility in the Northeast — 1.6 million square feet, twenty-three soundstages, a twenty-two-acre water backlot, the kind of numbers that used to belong exclusively to Georgia and Los Angeles. The developers are talking about 2,300 union jobs to build the thing and another 2,000 to run it. New Jersey, on the strength of a genuinely aggressive tax-credit program, is now being talked about as the potential number-three production hub in America. Behind California and Georgia. Ahead of everybody else.

A film industry isn’t only movie stars. It’s electricians and carpenters and caterers — the skilled union work South Jersey’s trades have always been good at.Vinny Vinci

Why it matters down here

Here's why this matters in South Jersey, and not just as something happening up north. A film industry isn't only movie stars and directors. It's electricians and carpenters and caterers and truck drivers and the woman who runs the dry cleaner that suddenly has forty wardrobe orders a week. Those jobs — the grip, the gaffer, the set builder — are exactly the kind of skilled, union, middle-class work our trades have always been good at. When a soundstage needs framing, it doesn't care which side of the state you drove in from.

Do I have reservations? Of course — I'm from Woodbury, skepticism is our regional dialect. Tax-credit booms can be fragile; the incentives that lured this industry here could lure it somewhere else if another state waves a bigger check. A campus that opens in 2028 is a promise, and promises in this business slip. But I've covered enough hype to know the difference between a press conference and a hiring page, and this is the second thing. Maybe we gave the movies away a hundred years ago. Maybe we're about to take a little of it back. Roll camera. For once, it's not a bit.

Based on reporting from Jersey Digs, ROI-NJ, NJBIZ, The Hollywood Reporter, and CoStar.