FÜRNHEIM, Germany (ADAC) – On Monday the German government’s federal film commission, the DDFLM, announced that they were now going to offer a 90% tax rebate to American film production companies who shoot 100% of their films within the country. In a packed room at the Forstquell-Brauerei the commission’s president, Max Furzmann, said the move was  to compete for the American studio projects with states such as Louisiana, New York and Georgia, and countries such as Canada who offer large tax rebate incentives to lure film productions there.

This deal has apparently been in the works for some time as a source at Universal Pictures in Los Angeles reported that there are plans to dismantle all of the sound stages at Universal Studios and rebuild them in Europe. Universal representative Michael Dorftrottel, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said “What do we need stages for anyway? Everything’s done in a computer now, isn’t it?”

Removing the stages will allow Universal’s new upcoming Harry Potter attraction to encompass the area now taken up by the only part of the studio actually used for making films. It will also allow the studio space to provide much larger climate-controlled covered parking areas for upper-management.

Late Monday, the Louisiana Film Commission held a press conference where they announced that the state, known among industry insiders as ‘Hollywood South’, was considering increasing the current film tax incentive rate to 95% in response to the German rebate program. This suggested rate increase is still apparently being hotly debated among the state’s legislators. Petroleum oil companies, who currently purchase most of the tax credits from the studios to apply to their own tax debt, are encouraging the state to increase the incentive rate to 125% claiming the increase would be very beneficial to the state as well as to the corporation shareholder’s stock portfolios.

Furzmann did not explain the German tax incentive in detail during his remarks but instead presented a short animated video by Jan Vetter, Dirk Felsenheimer and Rodrigo Gonzáles of the FKK group which outlines the various aspects of the program.

UPDATE: The Georgia state legislature held an all-night session which resulted in plans to raise that state’s tax rebate incentive to 300% of labor and sales tax. Also, 20th Century Fox Studio announced they would follow a similar course of action as that of Universal Studios and have completed tearing down Stages 14, 15 and 16 with plans of replacing them with much needed office buildings along Pico Blvd.