Vietnam’s Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism intends to launch a campaign in the US to promote Vietnam as a filming location, ‘in hopes of producing high-profile films that gain international media attention’, according to the Vietnam Investment Review.
In the past, Hollywood studios have generally used Thailand as a stand-in for Vietnam on the back of a more well developed film industry in Thailand as well as complicated procedures for getting approval to film in Vietnam. Most recently, producers of the Netflix series The Sympathiser, who had intended to film in Vietnam, could not get approval to do so on the back of censorship issues.
It’s not clear how Vietnam’s Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism intends to address this issue.
See also: Vietnam’s Creative Industries: Foreign Investor Cheat Sheet 2024