The widespread proliferation of US state incentives for film and television production led to a large number of evaluations of their economic impacts. The common assumption by economic impact studies that state and film production would not occur without the incentives has spurred interest in the academic literature. We review the academic empirical studies on the nexus between state incentives and economic activity in the film and television sector. We identify areas of strengths and weakness in the empirical literature and perform additional analysis of numerous states using the synthetic control method to fill in gaps of knowledge. An added contribution of the study is discussion of the economics of the empirical results that mostly is missing in the film incentive literature.