Incentives for motion picture production are a recent and popular economic development incentive among U.S. states and Canadian provinces. Studying these incentives is important because filmmakers see most locations as substitutes, while motion picture production firms are heavily influenced by agglomeration economies. This provides two very different cases to study to see how incentives affect location. I estimate the impacts of motion picture production incentives at the U.S. state level on filming location, establishments, and employment using two difference-in-differences methodologies: panel regression analysis and synthetic control case studies of Louisiana and New Mexico, who adopted aggressive incentives early. For incentive data, I created a database of all state incentives from 1980 to 2012. For filming location, I use the Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com), which provides 189,598 location choices, and I use the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) for employment and establishment counts. Most incentives have a moderate effect on filming location, but almost no effects on employment or establishments. These results show that incentives affect location decisions when locations are more substitutable, as in filming, but not otherwise. These results also imply that motion picture production incentives cannot create a local film industry.