Cape Town is internationally known as a top 10 film production centre. Our natural beauty, diversity of cultures and abundance of creative skills ensures our positioning and continued growth. It is not only our lower production costs which are cheaper than Europe, Australia and the USA, but also our creative and collaborative development skills that ensures this growth.
Cape Town continues to attract film, TV series and commercial productions with 4 757 film permits issued to June 2024 which is a 22% increase year-on-year. Large feature films almost doubled to 168 films, while the majority of permits were for commercials. While Cape Town summers were always prime film production months because of the long summer days, it has now becoming a year-round industry employing over 30 000 people. The Cape region had produced feature films such as Black Panther (2018), Tomb Raider (2018), Mad Max (2015) and Safe House (2012), and TV series such as Good Omens (Season 2, 2023), Outlander (Season 3 – 2018), Black Sails (2014–2017), Homeland (Season 4, 2014), and The Crown (various seasons).
Disney has also collaborated with Cape Town’s award-winning animation studio TriggerFish and others on successful films such as Khumba and Zambezia which were distributed in over 150 countries and dubbed into over 27 languages. Their latest venture on Disney+ is Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire (2023) which is a series featuring 10 short films from African creators, exploring futuristic African visions inspired by diverse traditions and mythology. This venture follows on from the 2015 initiative with Triggerfish, The Story Lab, which is supported by Disney and the South African Department of Trade and Industry, to discover African storytellers. This program helped identify fresh, authentic voices and concepts, some of which influenced subsequent Disney-backed projects.
Fortunately, incentives from the dti and SA’s co-production treaties with Germany, UK, Canada, Italy, New Zealand, Australia, France and Ireland ensure that we keep collaborating on projects. Producing content and owning the IP though projects such as The Story Lab, is just one step in ensuring that SA owns more of the value chain to expand our role in the global film industry.
